Better Travel Tip
I don’t remember where I was when I realized I was grumpy. Some airport. But the seed of what I want to harvest now was when I realized I was cranky as usual in airports, train stations, metro lines.
“You’re doing part of the thing you most love to do,” I reminded myself “so why are you so pissed off?” There you go, that’s a Christmas present already. Stop and question your annoyance, and it often goes away. But wait, there’s more.
Not remembering the airport means the causes were forgettable too, thus insufficient to justify polluting my travel with crankitude. They were the normal details of moving through crowded places, where people unsure of what to do with themselves or their stuff stop in inadvisable places at unexpected times, are nervous about everything, and all too often stand in the same lines I do. Most problematically: ahead of me.
Which means I had fallen for a common trap of travel today. I was seeing everyone else as an obstacle to my travel, if not an outright opponent. Those….tourists!
This is understandable. And this is a waste. Because the bad news is that Sartre was right when he wrote “hell is other people.” But the good news is the opposites are also true. Not only is isolation its own flavor of damnation, but more importantly: Heaven is other people too.
(That, and mountains. And beaches, forests, deserts…but let’s stay focused.)
These other people valued a similar thing that I did, and had chosen to make some of the same decisions. We were on the same page. Or at least in the same book. And it feels much better to see everyone else in line as comrades, not opponents. Travel doesn’t belong to me, any more than to them, and besides, they’re just not that powerful. They may be annoying, but the plane takes off regardless.
A couple days ago I was heading for my train back to Europe from London, and a guy pushed past me on the escalator, almost knocking over a lovely English granny. My first instinct was to tell him to plimba ursul, but then I decided he just hadn’t realized that I was not an impediment to his voyage, the train would leave regardless of either of us, and perhaps he had a good reason for being in a hurry to sit still. Bladders can do that to a person. Or perhaps he really should plimba ursul. Either way, I didn’t need to carry aggression toward him onto the train.
Instead, the granny and I looked at each other and smiled. Comrades.
