Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome aboard our flight. Please pay attention to the following safety announcement.
During takeoff and landing, you may find your thoughts drifting toward questions of your own mortality. Welcome this opportunity to assess your life’s direction. During takeoff, consider where you feel you are achieving your full potential, and where you are disappointing yourself or ignoring your heart’s true passions and your own unique talents. During landing, keep baggage of all kinds stowed and your self-esteem in the full upright and locked position, and commit to at least one change in your life to refocus on what is truly important to you.
Our cabin is equipped with personal entertainment systems that allow you to amuse yourself with trivial entertainment while isolating yourself from your fellow passengers. Please use this as a last resort, only after determining that your seatmate is uncommunicative or, if communicative, is tedious, offensive or otherwise poor company. And we hope you will consider reading a book instead, although we cannot recommend the shallow, consumption-obsessed articles in our in-flight magazine.
In the event of a forced landing, track lighting along the aisle floor will guide you to an exit. Be sure to follow it, but as you do, ask yourself how many other signs have pointed the way to a more fulfilling life, and how often you have chosen to ignore them. Form the intention now of following those signs – at least for a short distance – in the future.
Emergency exits will be found in the rear of the aircraft as well as over the wings. But the odds that you will actually need to use them are diminishingly small. What information would you rather be remembering right now? Perhaps the middle names of your nieces and nephews? The exact taste of your first kiss? The very last thing a loved one said to you before you boarded this flight?
During the flight, as in life, we may encounter turbulence, and the captain will turn on the “fasten seatbelts” sign. Take this as a call to mindfulness and allow yourself to experience the occasional roughness of our journey as a necessary and indeed beautiful part of the astonishing achievement of human flight. Should your gaze drift to the window, reflect on the fact that ours is one of only a very few generations that could hope to ever have such a vista. And acknowledge with humility the reality of our privilege, since the majority of the world’s population will never see the inside of an aircraft.
Our cabin crew will be delighted to assist you in any way we can, recognizing that the responsibility for your happiness ultimately rests with you, and that no in-flight snack or beverage can satisfy the soul’s hunger. Should you be concerned by anything you see or hear during the flight, please don’t hesitate to signal for a flight attendant. But ask yourself about the true source of your alarm, and whether it may in fact lie within.
Thank you for choosing to fly with us. Our flight attendants will be present throughout the flight. We ask only the same of you.
