空中碰碰車

[I] was flying out on a red-eye [from Portland, Oregon] to Cincinnati, Ohio. During many years of travel, I've often flown in very bad weather, but it quickly became evident that this was going to be an unusually rough trip. About half an hour after takeoff, just as dinner was being served, the pilot announced that rough weather was ahead and that we should keep our seatbelts on. [...] Then, suddenly, we hit a magnitude of turbulence like nothing I had ever experienced before; it was awesome in its violence. It seemed as though the plane suddenly dropped hundreds of feet like a stone, nearly flipped over on its back, and then righted itself. I had been in pretty wild turbulence in my life, but nothing that remotely compared to this. I could hear the plane give out metallic groans, and I wondered how long it could withstand this kind of force.

By now, everyone on the plane was screaming - even the flight attendants. The plane was flipping. dropping, rolling, and rising like some new and vicious amusement-park ride. Boxes and suitcases were failing out of the overhead bins. Drinks and food were spilling everywhere. It was chaos. People were throwing up into paper bags and all over themselves. The smell of vomit soon permeated the cabin. The pilot came on again, and fear could be heard in his voice. He said that this new weather pattern had taken ground control completely by surprise, and all he could do was fly us through it.

The buffeting was simply brutal. We had been in the turbulence not more than five minutes, but it seemed like hours. The woman next to me was wailing and leaning toward me as though I might afford some protection; the people behind me were sobbing; the panic was almost tangible. Someone was chanting the Lord's Prayer. I was petrified.

I sat back, closed my eyes, and tried to think things through. I knew I was terrified and my body was in a state close to panic. [...] I told myself I had to change it right then. I rested my head against the back of my seat, closed my eyes, and intentionally moved the muscles of my face in the direction of a smile. I knew that to turn the fear cells off in the amygdala, I would have to use a powerful image. I tried success images, power images, sexual images; suddenly, out of nowhere, came an image that I had not thought of since I was a young boy. I was born and raised in a sub-urb of Denver called Wheatridge. During the summer months, my buddies and I would ride our bikes to a nearby amusement park called Elitches. My absolutely favorite ride was the bumper cars. We would get behind the wheel of a car and go nuts bumping anybody and everybody who got in our way. I suddenly saw myself laughing and having the life of my life as I sideswiped and collided with other cars. I could even hear the carousel music. The screaming on the plane became the screaming of people having fun. Within seconds, my entire physiology changed. The fear cells turned off. The amygdala was completely fooled into believing that I was actually riding the bumper cars at Elitches - not being transported on a plane that was struggling to remain airborne.

I was told later that the plane was caught in the wild eye of that turbulence for over 40 minutes. I had no sense that so much time had passed; I knew that the plane was in a great fight and might not make it; I knew there was a real chance of being hurt; I even was aware that we were about to land and that the airstrip was engulfed in high winds all the way to touchdown. But I remained deep inside my images. I was having a wonderful time in the Denver summer of my youth. After touchdown, I opened my eyes and almost wanted to say, "Was that a great flight or what!" I'm sure the people around me must have thought I had gone completely mad when they looked over and saw the big smile on my face during the flight.

[...] I knew that if I asked any of those people why they felt the way they did, they would look at me as though I was crazy. "It's the turbulence, stupid," they would answer, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. But the turbulence did not cause their distress. I was in the turbulence too, and it didn't defeat me. What happened to them was independent of the turbulence; it was a physiological state they allowed themselves to be trapped in. They didn't have to be trapped that way. I was saved enormous grief and anguish. If the plane had crashed, we would have all died. Their grief and anguish would neither have saved them nor killed them. They had allowed a negative state to invade inside themselves. I refused to go through all that needless misery; it wasn’t necessary and it wouldn’t have protected me from anything.

-- James E. Loehr, Stress for Success (1997, pp. 114-116). Times Books.