Departure

 Departure
15-June, 2023

I'm so pleased this blog still lives out here all on its own with no tending. I'm reviving it because it’s handy for travel. I can post pictures and stories without getting sucked into social media which seems like a vast waste of time once one has flown all over the planet to get away from the usual shit. I’m on a plane. This is my first trip to Europe in almost 25 years. 

Other people prioritize visiting distant countries much more than I have so far. I’ve favored roadtrips so much I’ve visited every state in the country, many of them several times. I like roadtrips because they require much less planning, and I don’t worry that I’ll offend anyone with my ignorance of language and custom, or that I’ll get lost or hospitalized. Maybe you think it’s weird I included “hospitalized” in the list of things I worry about, but the number of times that’s happened when I’ve left the country or continent is a little exceptional. (See my Jan 29, 2007 post for reference.)

I also favor inner trips - changing what I’m thinking about by changing how my mind works for a while. One of my best trips was to Joshua Tree for a silent 10 day meditation course. After the course, I rented a convertible at the Palm Springs airport and drove it to Pahrump, Nevada to see my Great Aunt Betty not long after my Great Uncle Rod - my #1 favorite relative - had died. The drive through dramatic desert landscape, blissed out on 10 days of alpha waves and altered states was otherworldly in nearly every way I can think of that matters to me. Upon arrival in Pahrump, lunch at a casino buffet while my Aunt Betty chain-smoked Eve Lights and told me about my uncle’s death was an almost equally surreal shift in perspective. 

I loved it. I haven’t prioritized any kind of travel as much since switching careers from being a software engineer to being a theater artists. I switched careers to be happier. I love my life. I don’t need to leave to be surprised, or find joy and fulfillment. 

So why go at all? I could say that Robert is really, super, duper excited to go. 

Look, he's even smiling sitting here at JFK
while he talks to Air France about how our
suddenly delayed flight to Charles de Gaulle
means we have to switch our flight from
there to Hannover.

He has prioritized travel in his life. His teaching job wipes him out hard enough to need a vacation, and conveniently comes with summers off. But I’m not going just for his sake. I’m going because once I leave, I always love travel too. Vacation bends time, but travel bends space, like the zoom function in a GPS app. 

I remind myself often - almost daily - that the world is big and I am small. I do it when I’m overwhelmed by perfectionism and when I am infuriated by Minnesotan drivers. I do it to keep my ego and entitlement in check. It’s a coping mechanism though, not a real experience.

To travel, especially to a place where everything works differently, where people care about entirely different things, where everyone moves about differently, where different plants grow from the cracks of different infrastructure with entirely different history is to remember how much variation there is out there from what feels fixed and forever where I live. 

To fly in an airplane, to watch the horizon tilt, to get above clouds and weather systems, is to truly see and feel in the center of my little human gyroscope just how big this planet is. I always try to get the window seat and I spend a lot of the flight craning to see out, my temple pressed hard against the dirty glass like a dog on a car ride. 

I’m embarrassed how my world shrinks to something the size of a suitcase as I prepare to go on a trip like this. I obsess over what I”ll need, try to anticipate every possible unplanned circumstance including lost luggage, illness, injury, plane crash, terrorist act, war, and apocalyptic disaster. Simultaneously, I try to pack as little as humanly possible, irrationally equating compactness with righteous nobility and wisdom. I pace my apartment at least a hundred times, packing and unpacking things, asking myself alternately “What will I need if it all goes to hell?” and “Would the Dalai Lama pack that?”

Once the luggage is stowed, and the plane lifts off, I always laugh at myself as I realize all I need is my passport, wallet, phone, and good shoes. On this flight, the first leg of three from Minneapolis to NY to Paris to Hanover, I also grab my partner’s hand and realize I need him too. 

And then I look around at my fellow passengers and imagine myself stuck on an island with all of them after the plane crashes (I’ve been finally watching Lost, 15 years after everyone else), and I try to imagine caring about all of them. I notice they’re all plugged into music, TV, their favorite digital escapes, doing their own world shrinking and expanding. I decide that a lot of them probably got weird and anxious while they were packing for their trip too. 

Humans are funny and I love them. I’m looking forward to meeting a bunch of them whose daily world is very different than mine. Fewer guns, more cobblestones. Whee, here we go!