Waiting and Watching at the Airport [—at A Life Overseas]

If all the world’s a stage, then one of the best seats is at the arrivals gate at an international airport.

And if you’re like me, you’ve spent quite a bit of time waiting to pick up travelers, watching the cast of thousands walk by.

In 2009, British author Alain de Botton was selected to spend a week at London’s Heathrow Airport as its “writer-in-residence.” In the resulting book (appropriately titled A Week at the Airport), he says that “Entry into the vast space of the departures hall heralded the opportunity, characteristic in the transport nodes of the modern world, to observe people with discretion, to forget oneself in a sea of otherness and to let the imagination loose on the limitless supply of fragmentary stories provided by the eye and ear.”

The arrivals hall, I would contend, is no less filled with potential stories.

Your time at the airport may not produce a book, but you nonetheless can record in your mind the many vignettes playing out before you. As you witness the newly deplaned begin to pour into the arrival area, signaling that another flight has landed, as you catch glimpses backstage of pilgrims gathering their luggage, as you see the crowds readying themselves for whatever lies beyond the exit doors . . . as you watch and wait at the airport, do you recognize these travelers?

A businessman, head down, shouting into a Bluetooth earpiece, power walking past you to get to someplace very important before it’s too late to take care of a very important thing.

The foreign family with two small children, dazed and wide eyed, looking for someone who looks like them to reassure them that they’ve arrived at the right place. Is it you?

Finish reading my post at A Life Overseas. . . .