My son is pressed toward the oval window like it is a secret portal the world forgot to lock.
There is something holy about the way children look outside an airplane. Not curious in the noisy way adults are curious. Not trying to capture it, not trying to explain it, not trying to turn it into proof. He is simply there, leaning into the light, letting the sky arrive in him without resistance.
The cabin around us is a small mechanical universe. Plastic edges. A screen that knows how to entertain. Trays and latches and polite instructions. Everything is designed to make travel efficient, controlled, predictable. Yet his gaze refuses that architecture. His eyes keep returning to the one soft, ancient element that cannot be managed: open space.
This is what moves me.
Because I realise how much of adulthood is spent building inner cabins. We create routines, boundaries, strategies. We learn to fold ourselves into seats that fit. We learn to keep our feet within the lines. We learn to be useful, to be correct, to be timely. Over time, even wonder becomes scheduled. Even joy gets a slot between meetings.
But my son has not learned any of that yet. He does not know the weight of deadlines. He does not know the silent negotiations inside a grown man’s chest. He does not know the language of worry that adults speak fluently without moving their lips. He has not inherited the habit of looking at the world and immediately asking, “What does this mean for me?”
He only looks.
And in that looking, he reminds me of something I keep misplacing.
That the world is not a problem to solve. It is a presence to meet.
When I watch him, I begin to understand the window as more than a piece of glass. It is a border. Not the kind that separates countries, but the kind that separates states of being. On one side, a child who still belongs to the wide open. On the other, a parent who is always tempted to reduce the wide open into plans and precautions.
The window is also a mirror, if I let it be. I see my own life as a sequence of departures.
Leaving childhood without knowing I was leaving it.
Leaving friends with the confidence that time would wait.
Leaving places I swore I would return to, then discovering that return is never a perfect circle. You go back, but you are not the same person. The streets are familiar, but your inner weather has changed.
Maybe that is what travel really does. It does not merely move our bodies across distances. It exposes how often our hearts live in the wrong time zone.
My son, meanwhile, is perfectly timed.
He looks out at a sky that offers no promises. No fences. No signboards. Only a vast, indifferent beauty. And he is not intimidated by it. He does not ask the sky to shrink into something comfortable. He does not demand that it be useful. He simply allows it to be enormous.
I envy that. I need that.
Because there is a quiet fear adults carry, even when everything is fine. A fear that life is slipping forward faster than we can hold it. That our children are growing in increments too small to notice, until one day a voice deepens, a hand becomes larger than ours, and the doorway suddenly looks different because they are almost tall enough to leave.
In this moment, his legs are stretched toward the seat in front, shoes slightly too big for his small frame, as if even his body is practicing for the future. I want to freeze time, not because I am unhappy with what is coming, but because I am stunned by how quickly love evolves. It begins as protection. It becomes guidance. Then one day, it becomes a blessing you give from a distance.
Parenthood with all my imperfectness is the art of holding and releasing at the same time.
Maybe that is why this scene pierces me. This is not just my son looking out at clouds. This is my heart rehearsing the day he will look out at the world without me sitting beside him. The day he will be the one in motion, and I will be the one waving from the ground, pretending my smile is enough.
Yet I also feel something gentler beneath the ache.
Gratitude.
That I get to witness this version of him.
That I get to sit close enough to hear his quiet breathing while the world rearranges itself outside.
That I get to learn, again and again, from someone who has not yet been trained to doubt beauty.
I do not know what he is thinking as he looks out. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Perhaps he is not thinking at all, only receiving. And perhaps that is the highest form of intelligence we forget as we grow older: the ability to be moved without needing to own the reason.
The sky will not remember this flight. The clouds will not keep our names.
But I will remember this.
The small head turned toward light.
The way wonder can live in a seatbelt.
The way a child can turn a simple window into a doorway back to what is true.
And as the plane continues forward, I make a quiet promise to myself.
To not rush past moments like this.
To let his wonder educate my tired adulthood.
To look out more often, even when there is no window.
Because sometimes, the most profound journeys are not the miles we travel, but the return we make to a gaze that is still capable of awe.