Looking for Thermals…

A friend, someone I hadn’t chatted to for some time, put that up as her status message on FaceBook. “Looking for Thermals”… It is something her glider-flying grandfather used to always say and it is inscribed across a photo of him looking up at the sky.

The imagery is beautiful. What I think she was trying to say, though, isn’t. It’s sad and my heart breaks for her. As it does for the countless friends I have that are going through a hard time at the moment, or have reached a crossroads in their lives.

I’m constantly looking for thermals.

There is a poetic brilliance to flying. A poet could find hours of inspiration in “Guardian Angels”… The bright glow that forms around your aeroplane shadow on a cloud; and “Thermals”. It’s an aeronautical equivalent of “throw me a bone” I suppose? Or the equivalent to Koos Kombuis and Valiant Swart’s “Gee my ‘n jaar in die son” (give me a year in the sun). It’s that wish for a break, the light at the end of a dark tunnel, the gentle wind beneath our wings.

The overly-passionate, sex-loving teenager in me is thrilled by all the woman potentially about to come onto the market (not my fault, really – all these women are seriously hot! They’re also all very intelligent, successful and over 35… Not that I’m fussy). The 40 year old in me who has put himself through a thousand furnaces and come out the other side with a heart on fire wishes I could take all the heartache, sadness, doubts and anger away from all of them. Doing that would certainly feel a lot more helpful then telling them they will survive it.

I feel very ministerial trying to assure people they will survive the choices they have made or the paths they have decided to take (or for some – that paths they are forced to take through someone else’s actions). I admire people that find a belief that they will survive through their faith in a religion… I think that takes a whole lot more faith then I could put together. I also admire those that find their Gloria Gaynor belief through the words of a therapist who, mostly, puke out a whole lot of theory they have picked up in a textbook or through someone else’s words.

My belief comes through what I have experienced… There aren’t many things in life I haven’t lived through – divorce, abuse, addiction, death, suicide, abortion, poverty and  joblessness. I have either walked through those furnaces alone or held someone’s hand on their journey through. I have survived. And because I have survived I know that I will still walk through a lot more furnaces and face a lot more demons.

I’ll be scared. I’ll sometimes shout up to God the throw me a bone. I’ll cry. I’ll try to find a way out and I’ll often want to run and hide in my little wooden house in the forest. But in the end I’ll get to the other side. I know I will survive it.

That is my thermal.

~ by Norm on August 1, 2010.