I’m on an airplane right now. Well, not right now, because by the time anyone reads this, spring break will have come to a close and I’ll be settling back into college life in Madison. But as I type these words I’m on a plane to Los Angeles, surrounded by people who might as well be miles away.
Despite their proximity, they feel distant; absorbed in a myriad of tablets and computers, enveloped in headphones to block out the analog world, these people are completely unaware of what they could glean from momentarily putting down their devices and contemplating the other heaving sacks of flesh all around them.
Looking around, dozens of thoughts begin to form in my head. Why is the man next to me highlighting the pages of that packet with a three cornered marker? He must be a student. Why are the flight attendants calling out for an optometrist? What kind of medical emergency would necessitate that? Who is that pretty girl sitting alone? In my mind I’ve worked it out that she’s traveling to LA to start a new life, but it’s equally plausible that she’s just on her way to visit family. What’s the story of that well-dressed blonde couple? In what language is that Asian man’s book? I’m suddenly aware that I couldn’t translate a phrase of it to save my life.
Isn’t it interesting that social norms are such that I don’t have a personal history with any of these people? When we disembark from this plane it will likely be the last time I ever see them. They’re nothing more than background characters, extras in my life, the life I get to think matters more than anyone else’s just by virtue of it being mine.
And now I’m above the Grand Canyon. Holy shit, I’m suspended in air right now. I’m suspended in air and I can’t die because I’m me, but that passenger who needed the optometrist could die because he or she is someone else.
I’m soaring through the clouds as a hundred other people breathe, think, touch, hear, sweat, laugh, fart, sleep, exist, etc. Every soul here entertaining itself with some manner of screen traces its lineage to a single-celled organism that lived billions of years ago, yet because we dogmatically insist on trudging through life with eroded senses of wonder we find ourselves more transfixed by the outcomes of basketball games and contrived reality shows.
I’m not innocent. I don’t bemoan the fact that I’ll never see these people again or that the most pressing thing on my mind right now is how sore this chair is making my ass. What I do find myself lamenting as I hurtle through space with people I don’t know who obviously matter less than me is this: There’s a grandeur to existence to which we are numbed, and we only have so much time on this earth before we ourselves become anesthetized for good, permanently locked out of the beauty of existing.
You and I, and everyone else roaming this peculiar planet, are products of forces billions of years in the making and a universe so vast it literally defies comprehension. Is that not worth taking a second to celebrate? And yet, even as I write this, part of me does ask if it really should be incumbent upon us to be amazed by something as abstract as existence.
The demands of everyday life understandably make it difficult to conceive of the world in terms other than work, food and sleep. Maybe it’s actually a testament to evolution that we’re more viscerally attuned to our immediate surroundings than the subtler, imperceptible poetry of being. Maybe because our biological imperative is such that we generally put our needs ahead of strangers’, I’m the odd one for taking time to notice all the other sacks of flesh in this airplane.
I don’t know. You probably don’t know either. As I glance once more at my fellow passengers unabashedly entranced by their devices, these humans with their own stories and perspectives, unknowing specimens in an article for some kid’s college newspaper, I realize that it’s ok to not have the answer. If when old age has finally ensnared me I’m still tethered to the belief that the universe is just as complex, terrifying and beautiful as when I wrote this piece, I won’t despair; simply knowing that I got to be part of all this will be answer enough.
Are you rethinking the meaning of your own life right now? Please send all comments to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
