On-board flight announcement.

Good morning ladies and gentlemen. This is your cabin steward speaking. Welcome aboard this Planet Earth Airways, long-haul flight to an unknown destination.

Please listen carefully to the following safety announcement.
All the emergency exits are now being indicated by our cabin staff .....
Some exits can only be operated with cash or a credit card; others are colour coded for the convenience of those who prefer to stick with their own racial type in an emergency. We have provided buckets of sand at convenient points in the cabin where you can bury your head if you prefer that when you are frightened.

One of the cabin staff will now demonstrate the brace position which you should adopt in the event of an emergency. ... As you can see this involves a considerable amount of muscle tension. We recommend that you keep your seat belt buckled and adopt the brace position at all times during the flight – it's bound to be turbulent.

Planet Earth Airways Plc earnestly desires your safety and comfort, so we will be providing you with endless entertainment, food and drink, and er.... drugs just to take your mind off things.

Thank you for your attention. Thank you for flying Planet Earth Airways. Please now sit back and try to enjoy the flight.

Hmmm!

Friends, this is one of your fellow passengers speaking. As the cabin steward said, this is a long haul flight and we are in it together so I feel I should tell you that there is bad news and good news about our situation.

Let’s start with the bad news. That safety announcement is, I am afraid, seriously misleading. There are in fact, no exits. There is no way we can get off even if the oxygen runs out. The so-called exit doors lead to oblivion of one sort or another, whether drink or drug induced or through endless shopping and entertainment. I realise that in telling you this bad news there is a risk that some of you will be overcome by air rage or other forms of selfish or self indulgent panic behaviour; but wait! Here’s the good news.

Planet Earth Airways Plc may think it has all the answers but it is mistaken. For starters, it doesn’t even own the flight. It is attempting a take-over but it doesn’t understand how to run an airline of this sort. The truth is that the flight has been designed for our maximum safety and comfort provided we follow a few simple rules.

One word sums up the first rule: trust. I have to be honest with you and say that, given our current level of knowledge, we don’t really understand how the whole thing works. Indeed the flight seems to be on auto-pilot. There’s no one on the flight deck! However, what we have begun to discover is that in some mysterious way we are part of the control system. We are responsible for a lot of what happens on the flight. You might even say, we are the pilot.

Unfortunately Planet Earth Airways plc has made it very difficult for us to appreciate this simple but stupendous fact. The brace position they recommend makes it impossible to trust anything or anyone. So forget it. Never do anything while in the brace position. I recommend instead the trust position which is much more relaxed. Just try standing still for a moment and then start, very slowly, to raise your arms, turning your palms up as you do so. Notice what happens to your mental and physical condition.

The second rule for comfort on this flight is don’t judge. It’s helpful to put this rule in a positive way with just one word – YES. Always begin by saying yes to what is happening here and now, inside you and around you.. Don’t censor. Don’t label some things ‘good’ and others ‘bad’. Just observe them, without judgement. Once you start looking you will see that we do an awful lot of judging – our thoughts, our actions, our feelings, other peoples’ actions, words. Most of the time we hardly realise that’s what we are doing. The trick is not to try and stop judging. That only seems to make things worse. The trick is to observe, calmly, without judgement. That seems to put us in touch with a deep well of peace. You might even say it puts us in touch with our inner pilot! Then what to do in each situation (emergency or otherwise) becomes much clearer

So I recommend the trust position, or the relax-and-stop-judging position.

Friends, we are now travelling at the speed of love.