I don’t often travel alone. Actually, when I fly, I’m usually alone but I don’t fly as often as I used to. For the past decade or so, most of my travel has been in a car with my wife and two bickering kids. Great memories. No, they really are. They weren’t always in the moment, but looking back, I realize that’s what makes family, family. It’s doing the hard things together—like being confined in a car together for hours. Yeah, first world problems.
I think that’s what makes traveling alone so special. There is time to reflect. Let me clarify: there is time to reflect when one travels alone and doesn’t have to get from Terminal A to a connecting flight in Terminal F in 10 minutes. Nothing special about that—unless you miss your flight—plenty of time to reflect when that happens.
I’m talking about a nice long layover like I’m on as I write this. Two hours to grab a table overlooking the tarmac, computer open, coffee close at hand and Miles Davis or Frank Sinatra playing in your ear, waiting for the next plane to take you home. It’s a good moment.
Alone in an airport is where you get time to breathe. To reflect. To remember. It’s where you see planes coming in and out from places all around the globe. How fast we move, roaring through the sky at 500 miles an hour—the way we roar through life. Breathe.
I’m reminded how Jesus’ life was so full of purpose and so full of moments to breathe. We need that. I need that. I need to learn the lesson that life is best lived when I slow down long enough to make sure I’m doing it right. When I sit to think and reflect and remember. I need to remember the past. I need to think of all the good times and challenges that led to blessings God has brought into my life.
I need to think about where I’m going, too. That’s another good reason to enjoy a layover in an airport. I look out right now and see over 20 gangways leading to new destinations. Each leading to somewhere different. Over the course of a day, just one of those might lead to planes going to 10 or 15 or more different locations. Just one. Adding that one to the others I see, plus the many at this massive airport I can’t see, and the possibilities seem endless.
I wonder how many decisions I make throughout the day. Some are planned well in advanced, like the trip I carefully thought through when I bought the ticket that brought me here. Yet my day is made up of countless little, spur-of-the-moment decisions, each carrying some level of weight; some change, however small, that alters the course of my thinking that might eventually alter the course of my life. In those moments, I’m probably not going to grab a cup of joe and think deeply on those decisions. I’m not likely to sit and breathe over those choices.
No, if those choices are going to be affected by anything intentional, it’s going to be a result of times beforehand where I sat and reflected; when I took the time to take stock of what is important. It is in those times that I became the kind of person I need to be in order to make the right decisions I need to make when the time arises. Thinking leads to being (and when I say “thinking”, I include what is most important to me: praying). Thinking leads to the shaping of my life into the kind of person that can make good choices throughout the day without having to stop and think through every one of them individually.
It’s good to be alone sometimes. It’s good to travel alone. To build some time in the schedule to sit quietly in a busy airport and watch the planes go by. To watch the people come and go, rushing on to who-knows-where, looking for who-knows-what. To take another long sip of my coffee as they scurry along, and breathe.
