I read
Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines recently,
and I couldn’t help but consider it alongside my current
business traveler’s “lifestyle.” Last
year, I flew around 100,000 miles, and I probably spent more nights in hotel
beds than in my own.
Chatwin concludes
that only through traveling (ideally on foot) does a human become truly
human. He quotes Pascal: “Our nature
lies in movement; complete calm is death.”
And paraphrasing Pascal, he calls out the reason why: “All our miseries
stem from a single cause: our inability to remain quietly in a room.” In Songlines, he follows the
paths of indigenous Australians, who literally define themselves and their world
through the paths their ancestors have walked and sung into existence.
Right away,
I see the humor and pathos in even attempting to connect the spiritual worldview
of Aborigines with my spending half of my waking hours dragging my Tumi Alpha 2 through European
airports. Obviously, there’s nothing
remotely spiritual about business travel, right?
I suspect that business travel is typically
so monotonous and soulless because that’s how we usually approach it. The business traveler’s arsenal – noise-cancelling
headphones, eyeshades, smartphones – are assembled specifically to insulate and /
or distract us from the world we inhabit. Then the plane touches down, everybody
immediately un-airplane-modes their phones and squirms like a classroom of 1st
graders until the sad bing of the seatbelt sign triggers the Pavlovian scramble
to get the hell off the plane. At best, this
experience is something to be endured and escaped asap; at worst, it degenerates
into scenes of violence.*
I am giving
myself the probably quixotic task of finding something spiritually significant
in business travel, or at least while business-traveling. To search for God and truth in a milieu that
seems to be completely spiritually vacant.
Earlier
this year after landing in Geneva, my bag was in the overhead thing many rows back, so I was forced to sit there while everybody else got off the
plane. I looked out the window at one of
the little trucks the airport guys use.
And I found myself experiencing that moment simply for what it was. I was there; the little truck was there. This was somewhat intentional: it was early
in the year, and I still fresh on a New Year’s resolution to try to appreciate
things as much as possible. I say that
in the literal sense, as in to take things in as thoughtfully and mindfully as
possible, not necessarily to be thankful for things. Although now as I untangle the different
meanings of that word, it occurs to me that there is likely a lesson
there.
This is
perhaps just a long-winded way of saying “Be Here Now,” a philosophy I
certainly can’t argue with. Perhaps more elegantly, it's a search for what Graham Usher calls the “sacrament of the present
moment.” Maybe approaching this from the perspective of the hyper-business-traveler, in an environment in which the appreciation muscle is not so frequently flexed, would be interesting. In any case, it seems like a superior way
to spend my time and energy than playing Candy Crush.
* This
seems to happen most frequently on US domestic flights, about which there’s certainly
more to be said.
