I can’t sleep. I’m caught in a most unformfortable state of inner analysis. It’s probably normal, but in my unique engineer mind not a single detail is left alone. I can’t help it.

It’s much like the English airport security, I imagine. Is this your bag, sir? I’m sad to say yes when the stranger takes my bag to his table. He pulls up one object after another while I’m carefully watching. Which one of the objects made him take the bag from me? What was in there that ought not to be there? If I had put more reasonable thought into it, would I have packed it differently? Or wouldn’t I have brought hand luggage in the first place?

Whenever it happens, I’m hoping they will take a look at it, find the thing that made them curious and then say, ‘That’s fine sir. Have a nice flight.’ But maybe this time, it would be better if the stranger just kept it. I could take up the water bottle, give it to him and fly away without it. Through the clouds to a distant country where everything is different.

But inner analysis doesn’t work like that. You may see something inside you which you don’t want there, but you can’t make it disappear. You can’t leave it behind. You can’t move on without it. Everybody likes the idea of the free mind, but we fail to acknowledge the imprisoning power of our habits. If you’ve been thinking a certain way for a long time, you’ve built a prison. Now you realize that you were standing on the inside. You’re alone, and you don’t have a key.

Is there no way I can remove these bars? The problem is that just because it’s in your mind, that doesn’t make it imaginary. The neural pathways in the brain are quite real. You walked these paths quite literally. The joy you experienced from it was real, too. Otherwise, the grief you experience now wouldn’t be real, either. Access is denied. It seems I’ll miss my flight again.

It’s the middle of the night. I’m saving this one, because I think it might be too early to publish it. I’m still looking through my bag saying, ‘If only …’ (But as you can see I published it next day.)