Today is a travel day. Which means, more or less, time spent in an airport followed by a long cross-country flight. I realize that such experiences are associated with alienation (as highlighted, notably, in the recent book-turned-film “Up in the Air”). And yet, as Dean pointed out in his comment on yesterday’s post about upgrade narratives, sometimes what you really need is a short vacation from your usual self.
Like most of my friends, I’m a fairly sociable person. There are few things I find more wonderful than great conversation with someone I really like. And yet there is something to be said for the temporary monk-like existence of the air traveller. Once I board my flight I will be off the internet, and then it will just be me and my thoughts, unconnected to either coast, and therefore out of touch with any of my social spheres.
I look forward to these hours of enforced isolation as prime opportunities to slow down, to reflect, and perhaps to create. With nothing to distract me from the immediate, with blessed (if temporary) respite from emails pulling me back to my many waiting obligations, I can take time to think about something for more than a few minutes at a stretch.
And then of course, after the flight comes a kind of homecoming — the friends at the other side of the journey, the catching up, swapping stories of mutual acquaintances, happy reunions over a bottle of wine or two.
But these moments are made sweeter by the journey itself, that space in between, the hours with no company but my own. I am happy to be traveling on an airline that provides no in-flight internet service. For when I greet my friends at the end of my flight, there is that much more chance that the person they encounter will (at least temporarily) be free from that harrying day-to-day which plagues us all in this internet age, with our unkempt electronic tangle of obligations and emails and follow-up meetings.
With any luck, by the time I deplane — after I’ve had some hours away from our vast shared electronic echo chamber — my friends will be greeting a more authentic version of me.