On my travels, an education as I let the world come to me

On multiple journeys across two months, the writer observed, engaged with people and soaked in some lessons.

- Rohit Brijnath

In the thin air above America arrives a profound failure of empathy. It's a Monday morning in April and the grey-haired lady two seats away from me on the aisle is laughing as she watches a film. Wait, laugh is too mild a word; think detonation, a sort of series of mini-explosions of mirth and gasps.

As she jerks in her seat like a backfiring car, I think, rather uncharitably, another 15 hours from Atlanta to Seoul of this? Then, quickly, I figure she might have a nervous tic, a smiling woman who has uncontrollable audible outbursts to stimuli. Shame washes over me like a cloud. I listened recently to a podcast about holding mirrors up to ourselves and acknowledging our imperfections and my pettiness makes me flinch. I believe the world is a wonderful scattering of the different and we must make space for one another. At 30,000 feet I can see there's enough room for us all.

Through April, May and into June I take 13 flights (roughly 70 hours of flying, 30 hours at airports, over 50,000km wandered) on five airlines into four countries and seven airports. I am travelling for work and for play, though as a sportswriter sometimes the second qualifies as the first.

I am a child born to the clacking and chugging of tired trains and the melancholy of whistling locomotives. Nothing rivals an open window, wind parting the hair, a world rushing by and two-minute halts at lonely stations. But the plane is a humming oasis, where life is at a temporary halt even as you move. There is relief at being unreachable (in-flight wi-fi is a horrific idea) and in burying yourself in a movie, a book, a bag of crisps and yourself.