Feeling A Deep Connection To Someone You’ve Never Met – Thank You Volcano Pilot
Yesterday morning was a weird morning for me and well, I just need to talk about it. It started out as most do where I go through my morning routine and then I do a slight scroll of social media. I went to Instagram and saw a particular story from a bush pilot in Iceland that broke my heart.
To give this some context let’s back up. In 2018 my now wife and I went on a trip to Iceland with 2 other couples. It was an incredible trip and I fell in love with Iceland summers. They can keep the cold, dark, winter months. That’s not for me.
Anyways, the reason I wanted to go on this trip so bad in the first place was because of Instagram. You know the feeling where you see one after another beautiful picture of a place and you keep thinking to yourself, “I need to go there”. This is exactly what happened to me with Iceland. I started following landscape photographers, then aerial, then I ended up following a bush pilot, and the only name I knew him as was Volcano Pilot.
Volcano Pilot’s real name is Haraldur Diego and he would post some of the most amazing photos recently centered around the volcano that erupted last year and the glacier rivers where they meet the ocean. He would also post funny and entertaining stories where they would start out as “Good morningggg!”. I looked forward to his pictures and stories. Here’s one of them:
Fast forward to yesterday and as I was flipping through stories I came across another pilot’s where he tagged Volcano and it said: “the pilot community is small here in Iceland and Volcano Pilot was one of the best, most caring people we had”. I immediately felt my chest tighten and I went to his page as fast as I could. He hadn’t posted for a couple of days but I could tell by the hundreds of comments something was wrong. At first, it seemed as if his plane went down and he was missing but as I kept reading and starting looking at news articles I realized that Haraldur was gone.
I sat there and cried.
For 20 minutes I sat on the couch scrolling through all of his beautiful photos and watching the stories that he had saved as highlights and it tore me up.
This man, who I had never even met, had such a huge impact on me and he had no idea. As I was sitting there I was thinking to myself “what’s wrong with you?” and “why are you getting so emotional over someone who you don’t even know?”. It was a weird feeling and but I can’t help feel a connection to Haraldur.
He is the reason we went to Iceland and got to experience such a beautiful country.
And it makes me happy to know that there are probably hundreds if not thousands of people that were influenced by him who did the same.
Social media is weird, and a lot of times it has a negative impact but in this case, it was nothing but positive. Sure, social media isn’t real life but it is still a powerful thing that can be used for good. Haraldur you don’t know me and unfortunately, I will never get the chance to fly over Iceland with you but I want to thank you.
Thank you for being who you were and sharing your experiences, you will always be an important person to me.
To commemorate Volcano Pilot here are some of my favorite pictures of his:
