There’s something about airports, isn’t there? Just that feeling of excitement and newness and anticipation.
And there’s something about being in a new place, seeing sights you’ve never seen before, talking to people you’ve never met, getting the chance to lay your own eyes on things you’ve only ever seen pictures of. It brings colors to the world that you could never have found on your own.
There’s a joy in traveling, a rush of exploring that pushes you to walk down that new trail, to go out instead of going home, to run up to your plans and breathe in the fresh air around them.
Or I assume there’d be all of that still here, if I wasn’t too busy trying to be efficient.
Listen, I’ve travelled a lot over the past four years or so. I backpacked through Europe, I went to a couple of NASA conferences up and down the east coast, I’ve been to weddings states away, I ran a traveling planetarium program, I drove a moving truck to New York City. I know the drill. I know what you do when you get to a new place, how to make the most of your hotel stay, how to get past all those tourists around you. I know how to get stuff done.
It’s a useful skill set, but it leaves me frustrated. I wanted to stare out the window as the nation changed below me. I wanted to wander through an airport with the aimless purposelessness of the uninitiated, to want to be there instead of tolerating the time I spent there. I want the world to be brand new while I go to a place I’ve never been before.
We left Hickory before the morning really got started, we had a delay in our flight out of Charlotte, which meant that our plane landed in Houston later than planned and they switched us to a different plane for the continuation of our flight to Dallas, which meant that we jogged to our gate to catch our connection to LA. Then, once we landed, there was the politeness of staying with relatives and the sleep of the travel-exhausted. And it’s not that any of that was bad, per se. It was just that I knew how this worked, how we had to make it work, and it felt like work. I have yet to figure out how to make work into anything resembling leisure.
But the next morning, there was the Pacific.
And the next day, there was the Pacific.
I haven’t been in water that can pick me up in longer than I can remember. When I was a kid, it was easier to go jump in the waves, to run up against them, to imagine that you could hop over them, to think that there was nothing scary out there. Thinking about the news from this summer, maybe I should have seen Jaws at a younger age. But I remember the ocean and always wanting to go farther, never wanting to be called back. I remember (or imagine remembering) being the kid almost too impatient for sunscreen, sprinting off towards the waves as soon as an acceptable layer of sun protection was on top of my skin.
Somewhere along the way, I lost that. The adults stayed on the sand, so I started to, too. My friends were much more interested in the sun, so I hung out with them on the beach too. I forgot that feeling of running to the waves, forgot that there could be any reason for me to want to be out where the water came above my knees.
The Pacific is… so cold. Just… so cold. Especially in comparison to the Atlantic, which, in shallow places in the peak of summer is almost a comfortable bath temperature. But once you get used to it, once the first surprisingly big wave drenches your hair, the cold is a non-issue. I spent half an hour swimming over and under and through waves in that cold water and it was a beautiful kind of freedom. For those couple of seconds when the waves pushed me higher than I could have jumped and supported me all the way back down to the sand, twenty years ticked off the clock.
Now I’m not old enough to really long for the days of two decades ago, but I know what those years feel like. Twenty years of learning how to carry myself. Twenty years of picking myself back up. Twenty years of figuring out how to be out of the way and figuring out when to fight my way back in. Twenty years of growing doubt and frustration and big ideas and bigger dreams and effort and failure of a sort. Twenty years of weight piled and stuffed into that invisible sack that sits on my shoulders and changes how I see the world. A couple of seconds without that is something I’d go back for over and over and over again.
So I did.
Maybe the salt clears out your eyes or something. Maybe it’s just a clarity in the air. But I think I could see the world in a new-old way, with all that excitement breathes into your soul and all that practicality saves for your body. I could get good at this life thing if I just figured out that balance, the reckless abandon without a wreck.
But this trip? It’s a start.
No comments:
Post a Comment