A travel day is a day when you are going from one place to another place. Even if you are only traveling for part of the day, the travel day is the whole day, not part of the day.
At the airport, there are so many people. You wait in lines, but it doesn’t matter. Lines are part of it. There are rules. Put this there, put that here, hand this to this person. Look into this camera. You don’t need to smile. But if you smile at the people who work at the airport, it makes them smile back. It does not take much.
On a travel day, you get to say things like, “I can’t make that call – it’s a travel day, ” or “That will have to wait – it’s a travel day”. And then you don’t have to worry about that thing for the whole day. It’s still there, but you don’t see it.
You don’t think about how you need to make a dentist appointment, or if your gutters are clean, or if the thing you said to that kid in third grade was good or bad. It is a travel day.
On a travel day, time is not real. It is fake. The clocks say the time, but the planes will go when the planes go, and you will go when they go. You cannot do anything about it. Sometimes you see people try – they are yelling angry words or stomping about, but it will not make the planes go. It just makes them feel better. And that is ok. Because it is a travel day for them too.
You flow through the people and the planes just go up and down and up and down, and no one says it’s time to do this or it’s time to do that. It is not time for anything. It is the time for getting from this place to that place, and if you do that, you did good. And if you don’t do that, it is not your fault. It is the fault of the airlines, or the weather, or the pilot, or the angry man on the plane.
Sometimes you take a fourteen-hour flight to Hong Kong even though you don’t need to go to Hong Kong. Because it is a travel day.
Leave a Reply