Mira Black
I woke up at the airport. I was conscious but in this moment I realized I had been on automatic
pilot flowing through my morning with my skill set as a traveller and of all the things I am, I am
a traveller. Once through all the tasks from packing to taxi, check in to security, board and
buckled in, I woke up as if I’d been dreaming about taking a trip. Here, now, I remembered
what I am doing and began to watch the current moment. I began listening to instructions flow
through my mind without attaching or making a story about those thoughts.
I become sharply aware of my body. This is another reason why I’ve been on auto-pilot. The
injury spasming in my back is soothed best when I am connected. Heels. Toes. Arches. Pinky.
Index. Thumb. All the way up to and through the crown of my head. So there is away the
actions of my external body is on auto pilot while my inner world is absolutely focused on
maintaining the proper posture required to carry luggage, walk through an airport and sit in on
an aeroplane. In a singe moment both those things, the subject and object, collide. There’s that
rubber band snapping my attention, waking me to presence, to the truth of who I am.
I am this one, yes of course. However, there is a deeper truth I find when I can take a step back
from this physical experience, take a clear view past my conditioned mind. In these moments,
there is only what is directly in front of me. This vehicle called body currently set with a kind of
alarm system. Searing pain shoot up my back and across my waist if I should become
distracted from the practice of internally connecting. I pull everything to my core and find
balance there. I soften my eyes and relax into this moment. Then I notice with a bright contrast
that though I am surrounded by others there is no connection between us.
Heels. Toes. Arches. I am drawn in and upright. My eyes now open scanning the airport full of
people. Full of people and yet no one is speaking to each other except the few who are in a
group and still only speak to another inside their group. We stand huddled by coffee shop
counter tops and blandly express how we take our coffee. There isn’t even an auto-pilot
greeting between them. Just coffee talk. Then money talk. Sometimes I hear someone say
“thank you” however I do not sense gratitude but instead a feeling they might just think “thank
you” is merely something you’re supposed to say when someone gives you what you’ve asked
for. Walking slowly and mindfully I sometimes catch someone’s eye who is sitting on a bench
with no expression on their face. No predictive indication of their inner experience other than
an energy of “waiting”. The airport is literally the space between where you were and where
you are going both sides having it’s own story. I smile to another and see a surprised
expression cross their face as though they’ve been caught doing something they ought not be
doing.
In this mid morning atmosphere I notice next how quiet the airport seems to me right now. For
the amount of people bustling here and there, back and forth, there is very little engagement
between and so very little noise. Everyone is very polite. But not connected. The loudspeaker
bellows out instructions and requests from time to time in distracted tones. The
announcement, even if calling out for someone specific, is disconnected from the space that
voice is flowing through. We are together and still remain completely apart.
It’s time to board the plane. Standing in a very long line, (heels, toes arches) I look around, Im
at a basic centre of a crowd. I think three hundred people, standing or sitting all glazed eyes.
No one is connecting even when I try. In fact there seems to be some sort of protective force
field when I smile at a stranger. Their head bowed. Physically I notice this bowed head over
and over usually staring at a phone or computer screen. Back bend awkwardly under a
wretched neck.
Here at the end of this communication about my observing others at the airport, I notice that
though i believe myself to have been awake and present, I was also someone not talking or
making efforts to connect or speak to another. Walking slow and orderly down the block
between the gate and the plane, there is an eery silence. We all sit and buckle in sometimes
saying hello to the stranger in the same aisle but mostly not. Mostly no eye contact. Head
down, eyes averted, dis engaged. Un connected. So I chose to break the silence and start a
conversation with the women next to me. She turned her head as though to look at me but her
eyes didn’t leave her iPad. “Do you have internet?” I ask. “No, not yet”. Silence. Cabin crew
make noise but it’s again auto pilot. The plane moves down the runway and I can here pages
turning from some oddity sitting somewhere on the plane, I mean who has paper anymore?
Blah blah auto announcements about safety and timing and flight expectations. Then we
ascend. Still in silence. The plane lifts off and I think to myself, with no charge or trigger at all,
“We could crash”. It does happen. Higher we go, nose up and up towards it’s destination and I
wonder who these others are sitting in this machine with me. Its seems to me this is an
extremely intimate experience but we have desensitized and become accustomed to this.
Elevators, cars, busses, schools, office buildings, or at home, we could die at any moment.
This is the one thing, the one every human being shares. We are all dying. If we’re all dying
then its fare to say we are all facing the barriers, challenges and triumphs of Life. We all
contend with emotions like love and loss. Through the specifically varied elements between
each human being, there is a concept that we are all one. We are all connected through air and
light and the spinning of the earth.
In this morning of disconnect and auto pilot I notice my own sense of withholding and so
choose to ground and connect in a more internal way, past the course connect to the sublet
and hold space for the room with my attention. My eyes sweep across the rows, wrenched
neck towards those in “preferred seating”, the cabin crew in their own kind of auto pilot mode.
Before returning to the man sitting beside me with his headphones on and eyes glued to his
phone with not one word to me since I said hello and pushed my things under and over my
seat, I see a child peering over her mothers shoulder watching me. Her gaze glued to mine as I
my attention deepens inside this contact. She is unafraid and also uninhibited. She is points at
me and asks her mother what is on my forehead. Id forgotten about the bindi I placed mid
forehead from the package my aunty send from India. No judgment or ill intent, none at all,
simple curiosity and wonder. She stands and sits again, crawls unabashedly across her father
sitting next to them. Her parents look and quickly turn away embarrassed by my eyes in their
direction. I am close enough to answer her and so i simply say, “It’s to help me remember what
I’m doing right now, in this moment.” The little girl smiled but at the same time hides her head
slightly confused, I think, about my speaking directly. Perhaps strangers don’t usually pay
close attention to her like I was. I smile here, satisfied with this small triumph of connection, I
waited until the child had found some other spontaneous new discovery and turned my
attention back to my seat, back to my self, by back pain (heels, toes, arches), my retreat, my
destination which will finally re-unite me with my fiancé, took out my computer to begin my
assignment and so disconnected with all these others for the remainder of the journey.
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