"I saw a rocket at the beach today 😎"

 "I saw a rocket at the beach today 😎"

...is how I would have described this sight of a smokey white trail in the sky, if I were to rewind the time and go back to the times when I was around 5 years old.

We stay about a couple of kilometers away from the airport and hence the sight of planes landing and taking off is fairly common. However, once in a while we'd spot an object flying high in the sky, leaving a trail of white smoke as it passed by. Since we were used to seeing planes at low altitudes (which did not emit such smoke), we deduced that these were actually rockets (coz we'd see on TV that rockets leave a lot of smoke behind them) and we'd always be fascinated to spot such rockets. Over the years then we learned these weren't rockets but just planes flying high in the sky and we stopped getting amused by its sight, because it was just a plane after all.

Today, I actually looked up (the internet, after literally looking up at the sky to spot this phenomena) to learn what causes this white smokey trail. Apparently, the term for it is "contrail" (short for condensation trail). Contrails or vapor trails are line-shaped clouds produced by aircraft engine exhaust or changes in air pressure, typically at aircraft cruising altitudes several miles above the Earth's surface. Contrails are composed primarily of water, in the form of ice crystals. The combination of water vapor in aircraft engine exhaust and the low ambient temperatures that exist at high altitudes allows the formation of the trails. [Source: Wikipedia].

Contrails is probably an example of myriad such things that caused fascination and joy at a young age but eventually become something dismissive and not worth noticing as we grow older. What fascinates us now may probably not bring any joy when we are 10-15 years older from now and what fascinates/interests us then, would probably not be as enticing another 10-15 years from that point in time.

The contrail I saw today though, did bring some joy as it teleported me back to the sweet old days when we loved spotting one. Every small moment of joy counts and its probably the contrail made up of myriad joyous moments that make life worth looking back at, as we keep flying away from where we started, fully aware that we may never land back at the same spot where we started from.

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