When Your Head’s Truly in the Clouds

Long and longish flights allow time for writing, blue-sky thinking

Kerry Dooley Young
1 min readMar 12, 2024
Cropped photo of Carol Highsmith’s 2007 photo of “Clouds with Airplane” painting, U.S. Custom House, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Imagine in public domain via Library of Congress

With luck, I’ll soon board a flight from Buenos Aires to Rio de Janeiro. Sitting here at Ezeiza International Airport, I’ve checked that the Google Doc files I want are available offline in my tablet.

The estimated flight time is three hours and 25 minutes. Wonderful.

There will be time to catch up on work, of course. But there also will be time to edit my journal, to review my notes about my recent travels and about what I have been reading.

I do some of my best thinking on planes. It’s the opposite of the meaning of the expression about “having your head in the clouds,” or to be distracted and disconnected from reality.

How many of you also relish a flight lasting more than two hours? How many agree that your mind is quite sharp when you have your head at least up near the clouds, if not in them?

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Kerry Dooley Young

Professional journalist writing for fun on Medium. Digs kindness, art, food, cities, democracy and business. Home base is D.C., but I do like to wander.