The cloud photos I'll never take

I'll probably never take a photograph from a flying airplane. As long as I can remember, I've struggled with fear of flying, but I thought about taking pictures through airplane windows because of the last flight I took, this past weekend, from Atlanta to Charlotte.

We took off ahead of an incoming line of storms that (I assume) were fascinating to see from above. Unfortunately, since my flying anxiety rules everything I do in an airplane, I sat in the middle seat of a three-seat cluster, with my wife to my left in the window seat and an understanding gentleman to my right, in the aisle seat, and kept my eyes closed for what must have been at least 80 percent of the 40-minute flight.

I keep my eyes closed because I dissociate from the flying experience and imagine I'm driving down Interstate 85, or riding a bus on some long, lonely highway. Which means that while I'm on an airplane, I'm essentially locked in to my seat, constantly trying to keep calm and relaxed.

I dissociate because facing the reality of being 30,000-plus feet in the air is too much for the lizard parts of my brain to handle, and actually looking at clouds from above -- or distant farmland, or matchstick cities -- triggers a flood of anxiety that we're going to spin out, or simply plunge from the sky.

So even though I actually enjoy seeing cloud formations and other weather events, generally, I realized during that Atlanta-to-Charlotte flight that unless something major changes, I'm not going to see those natural wonders with my own eyes.