Reflection Excursions ™

Let’s take a trip. Let’s set off on a journey. Let’s pack lighter this time, set out earlier, and travel longer. My husband gave me two new travel journals for Christmas and I long to select a pen and direction and begin moving and writing. For me the journey and the journal begin at the first hint of the road. When the car is packed, the door is locked, the mail and newspaper suspended, our feet leave the ground and the journey begins. If the first setting isn’t Route 80 East or West, and it isn’t the bus station on North Atherton, it must be the University Park airport. Our airport is so small and easily accessible that I hope to achieve my lifetime quota of courtesy airport pick-ups and drop-offs right here. We can arrive with less than an hour before a flight and have time to check-in, browse the tiny café/convenience shop, pass through security, and read half of the latest Newsweek in the isolation ward, i.e. boarding lounge. AND I can begin my journal. Why not? Airports, bus stations even more so, and even Route 80 are rich experiences. If we had a train station here it would rank near the top for me in terms of experiential wealth! Just recalling the lives I’ve lived in and through Grand Central Station would fill a dozen notebooks! And the narratives, fortunately short, of being lost in Penn Station would resonate far and wide. These are all liminal spaces where lives are in flux. The outward signs of dramatic transitions, momentous change, minute developments, slight shifts, sorrowful partings, joyous reunions, palpable doubt, painful hesitation, determined courses, and heavy-footed routine flow through these spaces. And that’s not to mention undercurrents. The workers in these spaces are often invisible vectors just slightly below consciousness, even when we approach on the opposite sides of the glass at the ticket window. And even deeper beneath or behind yet another scrim are those who take refuge in the corners, stairwells, hallways, and empty platforms. They inhabit the shadowy places in the stations and in our consciousness, even when they approach us.

My travel journal will begin in this liminal space between here and there, a place that is a destination only to those employed on the premises. I’ve written about the seating in airports in Italy, about dignified garbage collection in Philadelphia, about waiting and waiting and waiting in Rome. I was fascinated by the staccato of metal cards clicking on the huge, old fashioned departure boards at the Keleti Station in Budapest on a very hot day in July. Our misadventures at Heathrow airport in London and at Guarulhos (GRU) in São Paulo have been duly noted for after-the-fact amusement. No, I lied; Grand Central Station IS a destination space for me. I try to visit this monumental space when I’m in NYC to feel all of the kinetic energy on at least three levels and in four or five dimensions. I feel more alive there, vibrating at a different frequency, alert and poised for action.

For Your Writing:
Why not? Go to a station or airport in your city or town. Pack light: just a pen and notebook. What do you see, hear, smell, feel? Write about the surface first and then observe the same scene looking at what’s not obvious the first time. It’s ok to imagine why someone is lingering at the café or why someone is running through the terminal. Pick one facet from your observation of this space and ask yourself what it means. For example, what does it mean that many airports have become like shopping malls? What does that say about our lives? How do you feel about shopping in airports? OR observe people waiting. What occupies them while waiting? What occupies you? What is “good” waiting vs. “not-so-good” waiting? Do people change when they travel? Do you?

Quotation for Percolation :
“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves.” Pico Iyer