Ways of Flying

Many of my friends have been asking me this week about whether I’m excited about my trip. Sometimes I take the easy way out and say “yeah, it’s going to be great”, but that’s not really the truth. The fact is that when it comes to travel, I rarely get excited until I get on the airplane, and then I’m generally excited about the flight more so than the destination (and then I’m excited about the destination once I’m there). I’d like to say this is so because I’m living in the moment, but that’s just not the case. I know of few people in my circle of friends who live less in the moment than I, and it sometimes haunts me. I’m a planner. I look ahead. I have dreams that I never will come close to achieving, and that seems simultaneously OK and doesn’t stop me from coming up with new unattainable ones. Even when I’m watching my beloved TV shows, I’m multi-tasking, reading email invitations to do things, checking out baseball trade rumors, and doing other things to take me out of the moment. And I guess that means that I’m generally not happy with the moment, or at least that it’s not quite enough.

But I’m quite delighted with the current moment of being on this airplane. Even though I’m thinking ahead to how this writing might be published, I’m also very reflective of the fact that the woman next to me on my KLM flight from Minneapolis to Amsterdam has taken a dramatically different approach to her travel experience than I. Shortly after take-off, she began to very systematically pull out her flight paraphernalia, which included her blanket, eye cover, inflatable neck-ring, a pillow, and presumably some sleeping pills. And she hasn’t moved in more than four hours. Sometimes I have to look over at her to make sure that she’s still there.

I, on the other hand, have read parts of a travel guide, watched a delightful movie, had a tasty vegetarian meal, and have reflected about how two people right next to one another and traveling to the same exact place can have such a dramatically different experience. And she’s slept through it all! Now this is not a value judgment, mind you, and I’m certain that I’m often the one who’s sleeping through things, but it’s got to make me think that when I’m in a car with a friend, and we’re going to the same place, that I could very well be having the experience of having just thoroughly enjoyed “Flash of Genius” while the other person could have just experienced a nightmare about his or her childhood. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it would be like to be able to have an out-of-body experience and watch myself as I interact with others around me, finding myself sometimes charming, sometimes repulsive, but regardless learning so much from the experience. And this seems to take it to a whole other level, the level of experiencing or knowing what the other is thinking and feeling. And it makes me think of a conversation that I had on my first flight today, where I sat between an oncological nurse and a popcorn salesperson, and the latter shaking his head and saying ‘I don’t think I could do what you’re doing, it just seems so foreign’, and me thinking that I can’t imagine my life any other way, AND that I’d also like to learn about popcorn, popcorn-making, and popcorn sales sometime in my life.

The last bit about today that I don’t want to forget is that I realized after my brother dropped me off at the airport today that I had forgotten to give him my wallet and all the stuff in it. This is a common thing that I forget to unload when I travel internationally, and it’s silly because I don’t need my library card, my Best Buy receipts, or my East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse credit slip in East Africa. And moreover, these things have value to me and I don’t want to lose any of them along the way. So I asked the nurse “can I ask you a favor. I’d like to give you my wallet, and leave you some money in it, if you could just mail it back to my place in Berkeley.” The only response that she could muster was “yeah, right”, presumably thinking ‘who’s stupid enough to give me their wallet with money in it’. And what it made me realize is that I am almost never shy to ask people something that seems totally reasonable to me and that I would absolutely do for someone else, and it’s not uncommon that it’s met with a less reasonable sounding response. And while we only spoke for 10-15 minutes on the flight, I have absolutely no doubt that she will indeed mail me back my wallet. It makes me realize that I have a lot of faith in humanity, and even though I love to judge people and call many of them idiots, I really believe that there’s good in everyone once we can get past all the other stuff.