The ones ambling along, smiling, window-shopping the crappy
stores with obscenely priced tchotchkes they have no intention to buy – these are
the ones who are getting a welcome break, probably seeing someone they love
when they arrive.
The speed-walking, harried, hungry yuppies, sprinting with
fashionably long coats flapping behind – they don’t travel for pleasure, even
during vacations. They RUN from plane to plane, RUN to the hotel, RUN to the
tourist traps, RUN to check their e-mail and make sure they haven’t been laid
off in the last hour, RUN back to the hotel, RUN to the planes again – and in
their running, never escaped their pursuing worries for a moment.
Some neither sprint nor stroll, but slump. Are they simply
jet-lagged? Are they traveling to leave some dreadful burden behind, or to take
one on? Has there been a funeral, a break-up, a layoff, some crushing news? Or
are they former runners, now too tired to run anymore?
Flight! The dream of humanity for as long as there have been
humans. To arise like the gods, rise above the hard, gritty, unforgiving earth
and miraculously be elsewhere, someplace warmer or cooler or brighter or bigger
or greener or safer or just plain new. To have adventures (but no real
dangers), taste the food and breathe the air of elsewhere, to stay as long as
it suits us, then leave to carry the tale back, or onward. To mingle, at Midway
on Saturday, with a sea of strangers, gaze on the infinite variety that is us,
consider new possibilities, feel the exhilarating power of knowing I can go anywhere,
and pretend that means I can do anything.
Flight! Whether we fly from something, or fly to something,
we are forever longing to fly. Our simian ancestors could tell us why – they
knew that the higher you go, the fewer predators can reach you, and the more
unspoiled food you can find. But for us, there’s something else, something
uniquely human – nothing pragmatic like the apes’ drive to be higher up, but
simply wanting to experience something new, to add to ourselves a little bit.
Perhaps that’s what worries me most about those traveling
business people. They’re partaking in a miracle, and they don’t even know it.
All the kids know it – their faces are plastered against the window, wonder and
joy and terror all blended in what our wiser ancestors called holy fear. But
when the wondrous becomes commonplace, even burdensome – what then? A piece of
our humanity is dulled, when we fly too often. And so many other things in the
life of a business traveler can dull his humanity, that it’s profoundly sad to
see this, too, fall away.
© John M. Munzer
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