A Meditation for Your Terminal Transit
It’s been a while since I was back in an international flight cycle, but I will be starting up again soon.
I was looking through my pictures of airports and aircraft as I think about my next three months business schedule and it occurred to me that I have not written about my thoughts on airports.
They are simple thoughts.
Airports Are Meditation Stations
Hundreds of thousands of people spill through airports every day. They do about four things regularly: 1. Eat and drink coffee 2. Check their messages and make phone calls 3. Change their travel arrangements and check to make sure current travel arrangements to make sure they have not changed 4. Wait
It’s what we do when waiting that makes travel interesting.
Waiting in an airport is very different than waiting in an airplane.
In an airplane, you constantly live with the expectation, fear, dread, anticipation that you will be arriving to the next destination.
In an airport transits terminal, you are at a halfway mark in your travel. You have either just arrived or you are just getting ready to leave.
This is often when you are not in your mind, or too much in your mind. You are also at a moment of suspension between what you have just done and what you will be doing. If you stop and practice active waiting, you may be surprised at what you learn.
For me, the following have happened:
1. Great ideas, which I write down. I solved a problem once for a client while sitting at a gate one hour before my connecting flight. I doodled it on a piece of paper and it came to me.
2. Realized what it meant to be a toddler by watching a young girl cling to her father’s arm while she gazed out over his shoulder. To see all of the big world while being supported by a man carrying her through it. Stages, practice, leaping into the world slowly from a stable platform.
3. Saw people get introduced to each other. Something about being in the undefined space of an airport made me feel we were all at a big social event. People’s guards seemed down.
4. Serendipity. I once took an escalator to the next gate and ran into a woman I went to graduate school with, and she told me her story of studying a dying language in the Chinese hinterlands.
The world opens up in neutral spaces.
Douglas Crets is an intelligence officer and expert network builder for the social web. Using his training in journalism, digital media, anthropology and the humanities, he creates social media research projects for and about the leading social web entrepreneurs of today. His company, dB C Media provides companies and individuals with data, behavioral research studies, branding advice, consulting on social media execution and meaningful media content to create efficient interactions with consumers, and influencers and on the web, so that brands, companies and individuals can form relationships that matter. His traveling takes him to at least 12 countries a year. He speaks Russian and understands Chinese.
