Unfortunately this is not Haiti Day 4. Tomorrow.
Today was a surreal day of travel. It didn’t help that I’m reading “Kafka On The Shore” right now– which messes with your head, but the whole day I felt tired and zombie-like and fuzzy. I left for the airport on the M60 Bus at 9:30 AM. I wonder how many times I’ve walked the two blocks to the southeast corner of 125th and St. Nicholas Avenue and grabbed that bus to LaGuardia? That’s part of what causes things to sometimes feel fuzzy– the way every trip– the collective experience of all of my traveling– begin to bleed together. Travel is typically something that happens anomalous to ones life. Like a vacation to Hawaii that you save up for for months or years. But when travel starts to become the norm, you fade into the same sort of patterns as anyone does that clocks in at the same place every day.
Maybe the difference is that when my office is often one flight up from baggage claim or in 3A on United flight 1603 to wherever, there’s more things happening around me to jolt me out of my sleep-walking and into a more awake state.
This may sound like rambling, it probably is, but I guess what I’m trying to say is this: We’re all asleep. We can’t help it. Life does that to us. Its natural patterns and comforts coo us to sleep. We wake, we make breakfast, we go to work, we come home. It gets broken up by things like vacations, deaths-in-the-family, flat tires or the flu. But even those become sort of part of the overall pattern. Until we’re all asleep and we forget that reality is thick and life is short. But every so often something wakes us from that. Or at least that’s the case for me.
Planes make me think about death. I don’t think I’m alone in this. As safe as they are for traveling, we all think about crashing on them from time to time because a plane crash is so completely outside of our control. So every once in a while when I’m taking off (it’s usually when I’m taking off) I think about dying. And that helps me wake up a little. It reminds me that every tiny little thing we do in life matters and is a part of a series of cause-and-effects. That what I do has legitimate lasting effects on my self and my world.
Today as I was passing from one end of the country to the other– as I shuffled around Kansas Cities incredibly depressing airport and had nachos and cheese at their only restaurant– I had what Josh McBride calls “the heavies.” Not so much sad or depressed, just weighed-down with the deeper things. So apparently I needed this blog post to be able to get that all out there. For what it’s worth.
