There is a great deal that I don't like about traveling by air. I don't do well with crowds or confined spaces, and my ears are particularly sensitive to pressure differences. Meanwhile, the seating is uncomfortable and the interruptions are many.
And yet, for all of its troubles, the experience usually gives me a changed perspective on life. Certainly, there's the fact that the problems of Earth seem to diminish as one watches the land recede and all of the progress of humanity get reduced to tiny dots and lines on the landscape. However, I am also in awe at the sheer size and complexity of the many human lives that are intertwined (largely without knowing it) on this Earth.
Just take the airline industry itself and the number of people (each with their own hopes and dreams) involved in my trip. There are, of course, the pilots and flight attendants. They, along with the gate greeters, baggage checkers, and security agents, are the most visible parts of the experience. However, there are also those workers who guide the airplanes in and out of the terminals, those that are working in the towers, and the repair and fueling crews who have checklists to follow for each arriving flight. We cannot forget the cleaning crews, whose jobs in this pandemic have become even more burdensome. There are also the baggage handlers who are cross-checking bags from multiple different sources that are going to multiple different destinations.
There are also the schedulers, those who are making it so the multiple planes have terminals to connect to as well as runways to land on. There are the computer technicians who are continually working to make certain the computers are continually operational (something that isn't really thought about until a system crashes like it did at the beginning of our trip). This doesn't even take into account the workers who assemble the equipment (including the planes and airports themselves) or who provide the meals or who make the uniforms or who design the logos, commercials, pamphlets, or websites.
This is what civilization truly looks like: thousands of people working in concert without necessarily even knowing it. Somehow, it all comes together in a beautiful symphony of which we only hear a verse or two.
And yet, for all of its troubles, the experience usually gives me a changed perspective on life. Certainly, there's the fact that the problems of Earth seem to diminish as one watches the land recede and all of the progress of humanity get reduced to tiny dots and lines on the landscape. However, I am also in awe at the sheer size and complexity of the many human lives that are intertwined (largely without knowing it) on this Earth.
Just take the airline industry itself and the number of people (each with their own hopes and dreams) involved in my trip. There are, of course, the pilots and flight attendants. They, along with the gate greeters, baggage checkers, and security agents, are the most visible parts of the experience. However, there are also those workers who guide the airplanes in and out of the terminals, those that are working in the towers, and the repair and fueling crews who have checklists to follow for each arriving flight. We cannot forget the cleaning crews, whose jobs in this pandemic have become even more burdensome. There are also the baggage handlers who are cross-checking bags from multiple different sources that are going to multiple different destinations.
There are also the schedulers, those who are making it so the multiple planes have terminals to connect to as well as runways to land on. There are the computer technicians who are continually working to make certain the computers are continually operational (something that isn't really thought about until a system crashes like it did at the beginning of our trip). This doesn't even take into account the workers who assemble the equipment (including the planes and airports themselves) or who provide the meals or who make the uniforms or who design the logos, commercials, pamphlets, or websites.
This is what civilization truly looks like: thousands of people working in concert without necessarily even knowing it. Somehow, it all comes together in a beautiful symphony of which we only hear a verse or two.
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