I didn’t know this at the time, but my grandmother was horrified that my parents went ahead with my trip after the accident. She told them they were sending a little girl to her death (I was just out of elementary school); and though my mother wept with guilt in secret, she protected me from their discord, determined that I have the experience I’d anticipated for two years, a reward for assiduous language study. That summer abroad was the single most formative experience of my young life. I can’t count the number of foreign and domestic flights I made in the ensuing two decades. Including, in 1995, a KLM flight from Africa to America via Amsterdam — Mr. Abdulmutallab’s itinerary, more or less.

Since 9/11/2001, or since 12/22/2001 (when Richard Reid attempted to blow up a Boeing 767 between Paris and Miami by detonating his sneakers), how many grandmothers, how many parents, how many people of whatever age, sex, or familial connection, have avoided air travel out of fear, or cautioned their friends and relatives against it? The risks of air travel continue to be minuscule, even during the War on Terror era, while the advantages of exploring other countries remain precious and inarguable.

Still, a fortress mentality settles in each time a new instance of attempted airborne thuggery hits the airwaves. In the wake of alarming headlines, an obstacle course of cumbersome but laudable security precautions unrolls at airports, leading many of the earth’s seven-billion-odd inhabitants to resolve to remain earthbound as much as possible. One goal of terrorists is to make ordinary people afraid to leave their homes and interact with the wider world. Attacks on individual courage may leave no scars, but that does not mean they do no damage.

In this last decade, nobody can tally the number of flights not taken, adventures not dared, countries not visited, because of the public’s anxieties about air travel. In 2005, rebelling against my own fears of traveling to sections of the globe that had come to seem perilous, I booked a flight to Syria and Lebanon to visit journalist friends who were living there. Days before my flight left Kennedy Airport, Syria revealed it had halted military and intelligence cooperation with the United States. My adrenalin racing, I packed, in anticipation mingled with dread. In the waiting room at the plane’s gate, as I sat amid women in hijab and children with stuffed animals and pink backpacks, I took half an Ambien to dim my worries. My companion, meanwhile, was watching “24” on a laptop; and as Kiefer Sutherland blew away one Arab “bad guy” after another, a family moved a few seats away from us, because we were so scary.

I’m grateful that I overcame my cowardice and traveled to Damascus — the most fascinating, culturally diverse city I’ve ever visited — and to Baalbek, in Lebanon, which Alexander the Great called Heliopolis and which is now home to the ruins of great temples the Romans erected beginning in the first century B.C.

Baalbek, also a stronghold for Hezbollah, is admittedly not the most welcoming destination. All the same, how can such a monument go unseen? It’s hard to assess the cost of the sacrifices an uneasy populace makes to the great idol Safety — sacrifices that have no sure reward.

Steps are already being taken to shore up air security in the aftermath of last week’s breach. But when will the skies again be truly friendly? When will Americans again be free to be curious, flight-miles-earning world citizens? Maybe we already are — as long as we’re willing to get to the airport a few hours early to run the ever-lengthening security gauntlet. In 2010, potential dangers will attach to every flight, just as they did 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago and before. Does that mean everyone should just stay put? For more than three years, the Department of Homeland Security has ranked the threat risk of domestic and international flights at “Code Orange”— high. But staying in your own house still puts you at “Code Yellow” — elevated risk.

How, then, to proceed? Perhaps there’s only ever been one trick to keeping one’s cool in challenging circumstances, the same one the British adventurer T. E. Lawrence offers for dealing with pain in David Lean’s film “Lawrence of Arabia,” set a century ago, in another war. The trick, he says, “is not minding.”