Introduction

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 1^st 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.