Here’s a parting story, says a cousin.
Once upon a time, there was a father and a son who had to travel far. The father, to test the son’s wisdom, asked him to make the long road short. The son thought about it, then began singing.
I have a book, newly-downloaded podcasts and several music albums. Also there are movies on the plane that I can watch.
Where’s your ‘Middle Earth’? my cousin asks.
Abu Dhabi. Avoiding Istanbul. The waiting can do without the angst.
Flying maybe the fastest form of transport but it can feel like the slowest. The most excruciating of these hours are usually those spent in-transit, having arrived at the in-between place, the Middle Earth, if you will, the space in limbo, when you are, literally, neither here nor there. They never show these in-transit airport hours in movies or write about them in books because they often have no drama.
In-transit hours are the hours of your life you waste away. The hours that are only glancing instances in tv series before the scene fades away. The hours, which, at the end of your life, you may want refunded. They never tell you about these hours when advertisements sell flying as a glorious enterprise.
Okay, there are exceptions to these instances. Yes, The Terminal, starring Tom Hanks is one of them. The man is caught in-transit while his country has changed, nullifying its citizens’ identities. But even in this movie, one can argue, the in-transit hours are the structure that frames the story and not necessarily the content.
***
Contentedness is a state of mind that is often elusive in-transit. In case of a long-haul flight, the state is usually heavy with sleep, making it difficult to lug your own body to that no man’s land.
The length of the hours appears elongated by the sterilised walls of the airport, fluorescent lighting of its cafes and shops, or chairs designed to discourage sleeping or napping. The mass of travellers caught in-between walk around in sleep-induced stupors, made worse by time and space differences. The savvy ones have books or well-charged phones. There are the wanderers who pace the gates like caged animals. Young people slide into corners to sleep, bags under their heads for pillows, with earphones stuffed in their ears. There are occasional parent who decides it’s a good time to teach their children how to do tricep push-ups on nap-discouraging chairs. Then there are the rebels who nap in those uncomfortable chairs anyway, those who would rather face crick in their necks and sprains when they wake up than go sleepless in whatever time of day it is outside the fluorescent-lit airport skies.
The problem of boredom in airport is real. The solution so far found seem to be shopping, eating, drinking overpriced coffee, or surfing the internet (if there’s free WiFi). In the few airports predisposed to arts, there are some exhibitions. Dubai airport has a “library area” stocked with a few books in Arabic and large, comfortable chairs where readers aren’t allowed to fall sleep. They have someone pacing the reading row, in-charge of waking people up to inform them that the chairs are only for readers. To test the prowess of the waker-upper, but mostly because the sight of a comfy chair in a natural-light lit area at 5am after a sleepless long-haul flight is irresistible, I settled into the reading area during my in-transit time. Book out in lap, sunglasses on to keep the sunrise from dissipating my stupor, bag and jacket at my side, I began reading, only to fall asleep three words later. The waker-upper, true-to-form, woke me up a few minutes later.
***
In-transit hours are when you call everyone you must call and then those you would never have called but call anyway because you would rather talk to the estranged than strangers.
Here’s a challenge, I tell a friend who specialised in human-centred design, how do you make long transit hours short?
Her reply is less answer than a list of questions: How come airports don’t have concerts, performances, talks or even book-signings?
Transit would be a wonderful place then.
She tells me of a problem she read about, the problem of boredom for people who had to wait for an especially slow elevator in a hotel lobby. They couldn’t fix the machinery. The hotel instead put a mirror beside the elevator door. There were no more complaints about the elevator’s slowness.
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But this isn’t a problem of minutes, I say. It’s a problem of hours. To put it in the frame of the ‘Once Upon A Time story’ above, How can long in-transit hours be made to feel short?
Instead of answers, the list of questions grows longer. Transit people are a guaranteed audience who have nothing else to do but wait for their connecting flights? One could use some stand-up comedy in-transit time. Humour, after all, is among the first things sterilised within airport walls, scared off by security measures.
The sombre, serious faces of the people checking you in to the sombre, serious voice droning on at boarding time, travelling can be quite soulless.
It’s all relative, quips the cousin when I call her up. Imagine having to fly to Mars, how long that would take and the entire journey would be in-transit.
I hang up. My phone is nearly dead but I’m sitting next to the gate listening to a podcast the cousin recommended. It is about how astronauts eat more hot sauce, the further away from the earth they go. Someone on the podcast says it’s because the astronauts are bored and they are trying to put colours in their mouth. They want to figure out a way to keep the first travellers to the Mars combat boredom better. One way to do that is to send ingredients instead of ready food. Because a lasagna is a lasagna but the ingredients of a lasagna can be anything.
Boredom is interesting and even more interesting is the challenge it poses. Why we are bored and what we do because of it.
I take out my boarding pass and begin writing on its back.
(The writer is based in France. She can be reached at [email protected].)
