No. 2 · First flight

February 1990 was when I first boarded an aeroplane.

I wore a bow tie. My whole family was dressed as if we were going to a wedding.

I was 11. My father had joined the foreign service, and we were flying to Kuwait for his first posting.

I remember the aircraft like it was magic. It was an Air Lanka Lockheed L1011 Tristar. I remember our first hotel too. A real ocean liner, turned into a hotel, sitting half in the sea. The Ramada Al-Salam. I still remember the beautifully manicured gardens like yesterday. The impossibly lush greenery in the middle of a desert. The tennis courts.

Months later, Saddam invaded.

That same hotel was set on fire and destroyed. One of the first acts of the invasion.

Several weeks after the invasion, we were told to relocate to Baghdad. Kuwait had been swallowed into Iraq, and its capital was now Baghdad too. I still remember the buses that carried us, stopping at checkpoint after checkpoint. Oil fields burning in the far distance, across an endless desert. We left Kuwait with only a few belongings and moved into a hotel in the heart of Baghdad.

This was all part of the Iraqi regime's master plan to keep foreign diplomats under "house arrest" of sorts in Baghdad so the US and allies would not attack it.

Here’s the strange part.

It was all so surreal. It was almost as if, for the first ten years of my life, I had been asleep, and now I’d woken into this unending, twisting adventure.

All of it, the moving, the fear, the losing everything, is exactly what made me embrace uncertainty. And there was no shortage of it in our lives back then.

I spent the next months in airports, aeroplanes and hotels in Baghdad, Amman and Abu Dhabi.

And somewhere in there, I had decided to make my life among the magical machines that carried us from one city to the next.

The thing that upended my life handed me my calling. Sort of. As a kid would, I wanted to become a pilot, but in the end I resorted to becoming an Aerospace engineer, the less glamorous role but interesting regardless.

The lesson:

Your hardest season is often hiding a gift. Look at what it exposed you to, not just what it took from you.

To be continued…

WAYPOINTS · No. 2

A series of inflection points on a journey still being written.