A Word on the recent Airline travel dilema

"Alain de Botton, the recent writer-in-residence at London's Heathrow Airport (that there is such a thing speaks volumes in itself), penned a reverie about what the world might feel like if planes were grounded forever and we were forced back into travel that spanned days, weeks, months.

"Those who had known the age of planes," he wrote, "would recall the confusion they had felt upon arriving in Mumbai or Rio, Auckland or Montego Bay, only hours after leaving home, their slight sickness and bewilderment lending credence to the old Arabic saying that the soul invariably travels at the speed of a camel."

And when an ashy volcanic cloud from a distant land — something elemental and ancient and out of place — slows our bodies, our baggage and our lives to that speed as well, there are lessons. They're unwelcome lessons, because they tell us that we're not as in control as we'd like to believe.

That sometimes, without our flying machines and the world they serve up to us so seamlessly, in the end we are the powerless victims of our own 21st-century expectations."

I thought this MSNBC article summed up nicely my thoughts in my previous blog entry on the Icelandic volcano eruption and its affect on airline travel.

jp