capsule

I love to travel. LOVE to travel. Travel feeds my soul—I get to see places, meet people, do stuff…
So I’m at the beginning of two weeks of travel right now. Today I left home in mid-morning and arrived at Montreat, several hundred miles away, only a few hours later. Saturday I’ll leave here and, through the miracle of time zones, end up 3000 miles across the country in just “4 hours” (including a layover!).

The downside of travel is the means of transportation. Here in the good ole USA we don’t have a lot of good travel options—it’s pretty much drive or fly. Driving takes forever (12 hours from my house to Montreat if you don’t stop. at. all.) and is fairly uncomfortable. Flying is getting less and less comfortable every day—long security lines, oppressive packing rules, people insisting their bag is carry on size when it is clearly not, and very small spaces in which to sit for the duration of your flight.

Today as I was getting on the plane (a small regional jet—the kind where you have to walk out on the tarmac and then climb a little staircase) AND, coincidentally, contemplating my woefully inadequate handling of the one-word project so far, I realized that the thing about flying is that all these people are basically crammed into a capsule—it’s an oversized Tylenol tablet (and you kind of need those to fly anyway!). It’s also, in some strange way, sort of a living time capsule. All these diverse people, their stories, their belongings, their hopes/dreams/fears about where they are going and where they are leaving…their dated hairstyles or latest fashion, their iPods and laptops and hot novels…all speeding through the sky at 35,000 feet, going hundreds of miles an hour.

I think shooting them off like rockets would make time capsules more interesting than burying them. Someone take a cue from airplanes, the living speeding time capsule!!