Somewhere over the Arabian Sea, at an altitude I will never fully make peace with, with a bad movie playing on the screen I am not watching and a cup of tea cooling on the tray in front of me, I had a thought that I wrote down on the back of a boarding pass because I did not trust myself to remember it by landing.
I cannot tell you what the thought was. I have lost the boarding pass. Thanks to technology I now have a digital one on my phone, but somehow the notes app never quite captures the same thing as a scribble on paper at 35,000 feet.
But I remember the feeling of it. The particular clarity that arrives somewhere around hour three of a long flight, when the phone is on airplane mode and the emails have stopped and the meetings cannot reach you and the only thing left is the inside of your own head, which turns out to be considerably more crowded than you realised.
Long flights are the only place I cannot escape myself. I have tried. The movies do not hold. Sleep does not come when I want it. The noise-cancelling headphones cancel everything except the thoughts, which apparently do not require sound to operate.
So I think.
I think about the people.
Not the business first. The people.
Specific faces. Specific conversations. The team member I have not checked in with properly in weeks because the quarter has been relentless and there is always something more urgent. The person who said something in a meeting three weeks ago that I responded to correctly in the moment and have been meaning to follow up on since. The one who I can tell is carrying something they have not said yet, and I have not yet created the space for them to say it.
On the ground, these thoughts get filed under will do this week and then the week happens and they get filed again. On a flight, there is nowhere to file them. They just sit there, patient and slightly uncomfortable, waiting.
I have sent more meaningful messages from airport lounges and airplane seats than from any office I have ever sat in. Not because the words are better at altitude. Because the altitude removes every reason to delay them.
I think about the decisions I have not made yet.
Every leader carries a list of unmade decisions. Most of us do not acknowledge this list exists. But it does. It sits underneath everything else, quietly consuming energy, the way an open tab on a browser you forgot about slowly drains the battery.
On a long flight the list surfaces. The restructure I have been circling for two months because the timing never feels right. The conversation I know needs to happen but keeps getting moved because something more immediate always arrives first. The direction I am not entirely sure about but have not given myself the stillness to examine honestly.
The flight does not make these decisions easier. It just removes the option of postponing the thinking about them. Which is, it turns out, most of what postponement actually is. Not waiting for more information. Waiting for enough noise to make the silence go away.
I think about whether I am building the right thing.
Not the business. I am reasonably confident about the business.
I mean the other thing. The thing that does not show up on a dashboard or a quarterly review. Whether the way I am spending my time reflects the things I actually believe matter. Whether the decisions I am making at speed on the ground look the same when I hold them up to the light at 35,000 feet with nowhere to go.
Sometimes they do. Sometimes they do not.
There is a version of a CEO’s life that is entirely reactive. Meeting to meeting, decision to decision, quarter to quarter. You can run a reasonably successful business in this mode for quite a long time. The machine keeps moving. The numbers keep moving. And somewhere along the way you quietly stop asking whether the machine is going in the right direction and start assuming that moving fast is the same as moving well.
Long flights ask the question you have been too busy to ask yourself. Not loudly. Just persistently. The way a draft comes under a door. You notice it eventually regardless of how occupied you are trying to be.
I think about home.
Every time. Without exception.
I think about the people who are there when I arrive and there when I leave and who experience my presence and absence in ways I am not always fully aware of while I am in the middle of it. I think about the conversations I want to have that are not about work. I think about the version of myself that exists outside the role, which is quieter and less certain and considerably more human than the one that shows up in meetings.
Long flights have a way of recalibrating this. You spend enough hours suspended between one place and another and something in you remembers that the place you are going from matters as much as the place you are going to. Sometimes more.
And then we land.
The phone connects. The notifications arrive. The emails resume. The day assembles itself around me before I have fully cleared customs and suddenly I am back inside the noise, which is familiar and necessary and occasionally a relief.
But something from the flight stays. Not always clearly. Not always in a form I can act on immediately. Sometimes just as a residue. A slight adjustment in how I am holding things. A decision that feels slightly more settled than it did eight hours ago. A name I need to message. A question I need to ask.
The boarding pass gets lost. The thought gets kept.
That is what long flights are for, I think. Not the destination. The uninterrupted conversation with the one person you can never quite seem to find enough time for on the ground.
Yourself.
Regards,
Rupesh
Cloverbites By Rupesh Sanghavi 
Leave a Reply