Of carry-ons and checked luggage

My recent experiences with air travel have been quite different from those I've had in the past.  Before this year, every flight was a means to a well-defined objective: a business or vacation destination.  Now, I'm floating from friend to friend, from one home to the next.  It's about living one more day, not about getting to any particular place.

Where airports, check-in, security and flying itself were once grave annoyances, hurdles to be overcome then forgotten as quickly as possible, they were now experiences in their own right, as tangible and as full of revelation as the most exquisite sunset, the perfectly ripe pomegranate, the passionate kiss.

I started to notice things.  Resignation as the default facial expression, more pronounced on airport staff than on passengers.  How flight attendants' cheerfulness seemed forced in this context, even though in nearly all cases it was sincere -- they've built up an immunity to the resignation, from years of spending most of their time in the air-travel ecosystem.  How children recognize the delights of moving through this mini-city where no one lives -- the quality that makes airports feel so much like theme parks without a theme.

On my last flight I was reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, a book I might eventually review in another entry.  I mention it here because of Gibson's marvelous depiction of jet lag: your body arrives but your soul lingers at the point of departure, linked to your body by a thin tether of spiritual ether spanning thousands of miles.  After a few days body and soul are reconciled.

With that lovely metaphor in mind, and with the newfound perspective of air-travel-as-experience instead of air-travel-as-annoying-prerequisite-to-experience, I started recasting my endless introspective babbling in terms of air-travel memes.

In air-travel ontology, from the passenger's point of view, there are only three classes of things: self, carry-on and checked.  There's a natural hierarchy to these three: stuff on your person is most accessible, but you're very limited (TSA regulations, pockets, weight) in what you can carry.  A carry-on offers greater capacity with somewhat reduced convenience.  And of course checked luggage can be quite spacious but is entirely inaccessible mid-flight.

These concentric spheres of access, these plateaus of capacity/convenience trade-offs, form a natural model of mental activity.  But far more interesting (to me anyway) is how pockets and luggage can serve as a litmus test for what we value, and how much.  A variant if you will on the "Desert Island Playlist" trope.

Try it.  Make a list of everything and everyone you value.  Assume each person and each value is roughly the size of a brick, and weighs a pound (450g).  Now, pack.  Who and what goes into a checked item? Or relegated to the overhead bin?

I've not yet entirely played this out in my mind, but my first thought is this: once you're all packed, in this little thought experiment, whatever's on your person is your real life.  Those are the values and they are the people you simply cannot go without.  They are, to your sense of your own identity, and to your personal compass of What Really Matters, the equivalent of the passport, keys, wallet, mobile phone.

I'm going to post this half-baked thought since I haven't posted in a while; but I'm leaving it half-baked because I really need to run off, into the world, and put some of these insights to the test.  And find a nice sandwich.