I’m sitting in my Toronto-bound
plane in HongKong airport, waiting for everyone else to get seated, as the sun comes
out from the mist and cloud and the afternoon shadows sharpen and lengthen.
In the last few days of
packing and anticipating departure from Chiang Mai, I’ve found myself in a familiar state: a
little edgy, sharp-tongued, unsettled. You’d think that after all these years I
would take departures for granted, but somehow that has not happened. I’ve
written here before about how I hope I never lose my sense of wonder about
travel, whether in a plane or otherwise. Part of that wonder is also what gives
me edge and edginess: a departure is a loss, a severing from place and people.
It’s something I can never get used to. On the other hand departure is also marks
the start of new possibilities and the opening of new horizons. That’s why
travel has such appeal to many people, including me.
But there’s a disconnect
between the romantic notion of “travel to faraway lands” and the focus and
attention to detail that are necessary to actually get where you’re going. When it comes right down to
the actual days leading up to departure, the practical details of packing
enough underwear and warm or cool or whatever clothing, and basic checklist
questions such as do I have my passport and other essentials? have I locked the
house? watered the plants? etc, then there’s not much romance.
I think it’s in part that need to focus on practical details that makes me edgy.
But I think that it’s
mostly because I have an old-fashioned feeling about travel. No matter that
flights halfway around the world can happen with speed and ease. For me they are still huge
and momentous departures. Perhaps I’m channeling the feelings of fear and
anticipation that humans have felt for centuries as they embarked on perilous
sailing-ship voyages, often never to return home, or made the fraught
transition from hard-scrabble village and farm life in rural China or India or
Africa to the terrors and possibilities of the cities….
Thus the idea of departure
becomes one more moment in life where we can be either “glass half full” or
“glass half empty” people. I am mostly a glass half full person, with a
(sometimes irritating-to-others) inclination to see the positive. When the time
for departure actually comes, though I may have been edgy ahead of time about
the loss involved in saying farewell or the anxiety about what might come, I
lose that little feeling of dread and can usually feel unequivocally pleased
about the new horizons that lie in the journey and the destination. I’m not
bragging about this. I think it’s just a matter of luck that I love the unknown
and the unexpected, rather than fearing them.
LATER:
Now safely landed in the wintry
chill of Toronto in late February, I look back on the thoughts I had in the
plane and on my edginess before leaving, and they feel like the clothing I wore
in the flight: familiar, now needing a wash and an airing, but destined to be
worn again when the time comes to make another departure.
These habits of thought,
which we may well be able to modify when we’re young, eventually become part of
us, at least so it seems. I don’t expect ever to get matter-of-fact
about departures or long flights or parting from loved ones.
And if travel is, as the
truism goes, a metaphor for life, then it is one way of accustoming ourselves
to the truth that all life is change. We can count on nothing remaining constant except the fact that everything changes and that we are all mortal and
headed sooner or later to the biggest change of all. Every departure is a small
death, just as falling asleep can be, a letting go, a loosening of the ties to
the known and an embarking on unknown seas...
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