It seems like I should be able to write something witty about being in airports, since I find myself in them so often. But the problem is that they are so damn boring. Everyone is just sitting around. Waiting. Most people aren’t even talking and the ones that are talking are speaking into small electronic devices we call cell phones. A few people are reading. The most notable example of this is a young couple sitting directly behind me, snuggling as if in a loveseat, while they read out of the same paperback novel. Most everyone else is staring blankly into space. It’s a strange thing that we sit here so bored with a thing that until very recently in human history would have been one of the most exciting, preposterous thing imaginable.
Ask any kid (and most adults) what superpower they’d like to have and they’ll tell you the ability to fly. I used to have dreams of flying as a kid. One particularly vivid dream involved me skimming low over the asphalt playground of my elementary school while all of my friends looked on in jealous joy. After watching the movie, “The Boy Who Could Fly,” I could be seen for weeks afterward jumping off chairs, tree branches and car hoods, hoping beyond hope that I wouldn’t fall but be magically lifted up above roofs and treetops.
Back in the airport, we’re finally boarding. We all parade down the jet way, into the flying machine with all the enthusiasm of those being marched to their premature deaths. You’d think a dentist chair covered in spikes awaited us all instead of a too-small recliner with a nice view. We impatiently wait in line, so that we can hurry up and sit down. Bags are stowed. Canned instructions repeated in a monotone voice. We buckle in and soon take off comes. We’re pushed firmly back into our seats as the plane accelerates. While everyone else sits nonchalantly reading the paper, I yank the window open, transfixed by the land dropping away beneath me as we rise skyward like a bubble on the breeze.
I love sitting by the window. Sometimes though, I get stuck in an aisle row and I’m angry. I crane my neck to catch a fleeting glimpse of some passing beauty; tentacles of green spreading out over the stark desert, great rising volcanoes topped with snow, the dying light on the day, casting itself out over the Pacific or perhaps a little outpost of a town, stuck there on heaven’s floor like a spider web. I want to yell at people to wake up and pay attention. Open your window. Put down your books. Stop watching your movies. We’re flying. Look. Generations have longed to gaze on what sits outside your closed windows. How have we grown so numb to beauty, to wonder, to launching into the clouds?
I imagine something happened in our collective psyches when we first shed our tether to the land and stepped into the heavens. For so long something that we had all so deeply longed for was made reality. Until then we’d lived a two dimensional existence, limited to our own two feet. Back before we could fly we were still merely humans. The moon was still a very long way away, hanging there in wonder. We were but terrestrial creatures, with feet, firmly on the ground. Birds still provoked jealously and awe. But now we are gods. At least we think we are. Once we accomplished the impossible, what was left to dream about? What was left to reach for? This was our last great achievement. Nothing since has come close to altering out physical relationship to the planet in the same way. Most everything else in modern science is invisible. Sure it affects us in profound ways, but atoms and vaccines and computer chips are so small and complex and abstract. To step into a plane and actually go somewhere is profoundly different. It is as if we as a human race all at the same time, grew another head or learned we could have babies through our armpits. We’ll never be the same. We finally figured out how to make the collective childhood dreams of humanity a reality- and now we’re bored with it.
In fact we’re bored with science in general. It’s ironic that in this age where our scientific understanding is growing more rapidly than ever, we don’t really care a whole lot. It’s not that there’s nothing left to surprise us, nothing to make us step back in wonder, it’s just that the wonderful and bizarre is now commonplace. On a daily basis we hear of things that could someday soon revolutionize our lives. I just heard something on the radio this morning about how a high school student is working on making alternative fuels from little microscopic alive things. This is crazy and wonderful, but things are moving too fast for me to think about it for to long. He won some prestigious award for it and a scholarship too. But here’s the funny thing: You know what he wants to major in? Not Bio-chem or Computer Science or Econ. He wants to study Philosophy and Religion; Ethics to be exact. He wants to study how we should treat one another in this new world. He wants figure out how we know what’s right and wrong. To discover how we might share this little planet we’ve been given. How we could live here in peace, without killing each other. How we could treat one another fairly and with dignity. How we could not look out only for ourselves, but also for the people and creatures we rub shoulders with.
He is wanting to fly. |
