On Travelling

Commute

I know my holidays start when I enter male’s loos at the airport. There is a distinctive nature to these loos compared to loos you visit in other places. In some respects, they could be confused with elegant office loos. On entering, you get surrounded by a slew of minimalistic white tiles everywhere you look, elegant designs of sinks, and the newest range of air dryers, aptly named to induce a certain sense of self-parody (think Air Blaster 5000 Max). However, the smell of airport toilet loos immediately betrays that you are not in a central London office workspace. Airport loos share a pungent smell of urine more with your local Wetherspoons than with WeWork. This is not to blame anyone for this particular state of affairs. The sheer volume of people that need to visit the loos in the airport makes any effort to fully clean and disinfect them utterly useless.

The airport loos are the first destination that I have on my radar after passing through the security gates. After spending three hours on all the possible types of transport, where I indulge in reading travel guides about my destination’s beautiful Gothic cathedrals and spectacular sandy beaches, and pushing through the security gates, my bladder is ready for a release. And when my sight falls on those white tiles and the slightest whiff of that familiar smell enters my olfactory system, deep down I feel thrilled! As I know my vacation has begun!

Airport

The loos are not the only unique and distinctive part of the airport. The entire architecture of airports everywhere around the world seems to follow the same template. The generic shopping mall-like food courts, the infinite highway of all the different types of moving walkways, or the gates with their giant glass windows overlooking the runway. All of these bits and pieces make airports peculiarly unique and globally recognizable architectural spaces. Basically, you know an airport when you see one.

That utmost uniformity is liberating though. I feel I can fully relax and let go as the space around me feels transparent. There is nothing inspiring or fascinating that would catch your attention while you sit on that extremely uncomfortable plastic chair at the airport. There is no Roman aqueduct to behold, no monumental Renaissance painting to admire, or some spectacular natural phenomenon to photograph. It’s just a crowd of bored people waiting in a giant lobby. But that’s a perfect space to fully immerse myself in the visions of the upcoming trip.

Flight

The dreams about my careless strolling, day drinking, and bothering my fellow travelers with pretentious cultural remarks get interrupted sooner or later by the airplane boarding announcement. I walk through the gate, juggling a bottle of Coke, a phone with my boarding pass, and a passport, and slowly move towards the door of the airplane.

The airplanes still feel (probably a little bit too much) childishly magical to me. In some sense, they remind me of sleeping. When we fall asleep, we exit this planet, this world, all of our friends and family, and everything we know to endeavor on a journey through pure nothingness. Then, after roughly 8 hours, we just emerge from that nothingness in the same bed, being the same person that we remember being before, and continue the day as if nothing happened. I feel an identical sense of foundational switch between life-states when I fly. Upon departing, we also decide to leave the earth (literally this time) and enter this amorphous realm of sky and clouds, almost a kind of limbo before going to heaven or the River Styx before entering the realm of the dead. The one crucial difference is, of course, that we can be awake in this nameless and shapeless place. And what a privilege that is! The whole journey through those uniform and soul-less walkways, gates, and generic waiting halls feels like a preparation to enter this state where any shapes and forms have completely disappeared.

My mind takes full advantage of this unique background. Strapped to a seat, without any connection to the outside world, I am left alone with my own thoughts. This is a perfect moment to recap all the big questions of my life. What have I been doing well in the past, where am I failing as a friend or a partner, where do I want to see myself in the next year or decade? All these questions demand an immediate investigation. I take the opportunity and fully immerse myself in reflections about them. I imagine the flight being a direct connection to Olympus where I will need to present to Zeus and his buddies a case. A case of my life.

Being up there 10 kilometers above the earth is an ideal place to think about those big questions of life. If you thought a New Year’s Eve gives you the perfect opportunity to re-evaluate your life goals and wishes, good for you. But you are probably spending that evening in a place you recognize, with people you hold dear, and very probably heavily indulging in mind-altering substances that will wipe out any potentially ground-breaking insights. None of these scream to me “A new me is being born right here and right now!” But flying couldn’t be more suited to that task of profound life re-evaluation. You probably sit alone (as you didn’t bother spending those 20 extra quid for sitting with your fellow travelers), in a space completely devoid of any known objects that you hold valuable, and without any connection to the outside world. It’s almost as if on departure, we left our lives down there on Earth to get the chance to look at them from afar.

Landing

As I am fully immersed in my own thoughts about where I am heading in my life journey, the flight attendants announce that we are approaching our final destination. My legs have almost completely forgotten how to walk, but I brace myself to disturb the peaceful sleep of neighbors so that I can take one quick toilet break. I return, fasten my seatbelt, and wait for the landing. Once on the ground and out of the airplane, I meet my fellow travelers and we head for passport control. On the way there, we bash other passengers for their loud snoring, uncontrolled flatulence, and unrestricted indulgence in expensive airplane wine.

It feels like very little has changed since we stepped into that airplane a couple of hours ago. I wear the same clothes, carry the same luggage, walk and talk the same way. But deep down, I know something has changed. I have been given a chance to start anew.