Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Airport Epiphany

When I worked for Grey Advertising a long, long time ago, in what seems like a galaxy far away - I traveled constantly. During any given week I could find myself in a half dozen cities, visiting one per day or sometimes even two or three. Flying at that point in my life was no different than taking a cab. Off one plane, hop in the rental car, drive to appointment/show/client/whatever, back to airport, fly, rent car/take cab, appointment, then hotel (maybe) or possibly plane ride back home. Ah, the single life. I could live that way back then, but not these days. At any rate, I’ve always loved airports and traveling. Unless I’m tired (back then I was almost never tired), I tend to be relatively extroverted. I have a huge ego; I talk loud, and generally love to get to know people of all persuasions. I find human beings absolutely fascinating - even the ones I hate never fail in providing a moment or two of insight I end up using later down the road.

Last week I got bumped to a different flight at Phoenix Sky Harbor due to bad weather hitting the upper Midwest (this was during my miserable commute to classes at Cooley – wherein more abuse awaited me). While waiting for my eight-hour-delayed departing flight, I became the brief center of attraction for a cute little 1-ish year old learning to walk. She was a real cutie pie. I struck up a conversation with what I thought were her parents and asked them if this was their first child. They said “No. Our son was killed last year in a car accident, so we adopted his daughter…” Oh boy. That comment, in turn, led to a VERY interesting discussion about life, God, The Universe, and pretty much everything. They did most of the talking and I had zero problems listening.

Everything I’ve wanted to know about life has probably been told to me while slugging my way through an airport. Things you think are important often times turn out to be little more than useless bullshit in life that isn’t worth the time of day, but for some reason we all make the unimportant important, and take the important for granted.

1 Comments:

At Wednesday, January 12, 2005 11:32:00 PM, Blogger Unknown said...

I agree.
I think awareness of your own mortality is the best way to keep things in perspective.

 

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