I sat in the boarding lounge at SFO, Tuesday 18th July, four days after having launched the travel segment of Rumspringa with buying a ticket to the South West coastal and cultural state of Mexico, the fifth largest, Oaxaca. The dawn light that I so adore cracked over the hills of Mount Davidson and Twin Peaks to the left. Coffee grinders hummed up with long lines to catch first brews at 6am. And the nexus of new journies about to start from that building cracked open my mind to why travel is so invigorating.
At any airport, I’m inspired in some way by the prospect of another journey, ever when you’re exhausted in the hard drive of a business trip. Airports have been part of my life since just after my first birthday, a first long haul flight being Christmas 1976, to be shown off to the wider family in Ireland. And in the last ten years, there may have been years I was on a plane 30-40 times, I’m guessting.
The superpower of travel is how the change of place will change our state in an instant. The movement, the change in environs, the novelty, the new angles on the world coming into view all crack open our faculty of curiosity.
Take-off itself is unfailingly a head warp, a novelty that has never worn off. (But too, it’s one place more than any other that I’ll slip into a short nap, awaking at an angle, emerging above clouds, or with the bing of the seatbelt sign going off and cabin crew starting to appear with the drinks trolley).
Beware novelty wearing off. An art of life, is continually cultivating our faculty of curiosity, per the theme of Autour De Ma Chambre that I wrote about last week.
