Friday April 28, 2023 around 8:00 pm, I sat in the Minneapolis airport.
Earlier that day, after finding a substitute teacher to cover my first period so I could get a night guard fitted, I rushed back to school to cover for a different substitute because of scheduling conflicts.
From there, I went to mass and confession to prepare for my sister’s First Communion, drove to the airport, dropped off my car, took a shuttle to the terminal, made it through security, sat down, completed two of my four final assignments for my Master’s Degree, and finally, around 8:00 pm, I took a breath and had dinner.
A dinner to mark that, for all intents and purposes, I had just completed my Masters of Ed. Leadership in Catholic Schools.
Thinking back to that dinner, had it not been for being stuck in an airport, I would not have “celebrated” with this meal. Even now, were it not for a picture of this steak dinner, I would not have been able to recall that I celebrated at all.
Why?
In my final semester of a master’s program, with a law midterm, final, and research paper, a finance budget project, and take home assessment all due, while teaching a 6-class course load, amidst coaching 6 am lacrosse practices, I felt like I had been fighting for my own life.
For the first time in my academic and professional career, I was forced to take days off: the irony being that the three days off, I spent writing college recommendation letters, a research paper, and completing a take home assessment for my finance class.
Sometimes you need something to remove all your agency, to feel like you
are a person again.
When flying back home from the first communion, with inconsistent WiFi, I was unable to submit my grades on time: add it to the list of overflowing duties. Instead, I opened Evernote and penned this draft that sat dormant for six months.
It is amazing how no matter where you are, what you are doing, or who you are with, your responsibilities latch onto you. However, it is in the moments where you cannot do anything that you are most able to do everything.
Maybe it is because I am a teacher, or maybe it is because I will find any way to fly Delta, I have no issue taking a long layover to save a bit of money or make a Delta flight more manageable.
When you take a long layover, you force yourself to let go of control of nearly everything.
You cannot control when the plane will land or takeoff.
You cannot control the weather, flight paths, or missing crew members.
You cannot control what options you have to eat in the terminal.
You cannot control where or even if you will find a seat in the terminal.
You cannot control if the WiFi will let you do work or download the movies and playlists you forgot in your frantic dash out the door.
That’s why so many people freak out when they are delayed.
Unlike those who opt for a long layover and willingly give up their control, when we are forced into a layover because of an unexpected delay, we are face to face with the reality we have, quite literally, no real control on the world.
We struggle to deal with the feeling of helplessness that comes with not having any agency on our lives in these moments: we realize that our lives necessitate circumstances beyond our control going correctly for our lives to operate smoothly.
We expect the plane to take off and land on time the same way we assume our car will start every morning: with an ambivalence to the reality that we rely on so many minute details to go correct in daily life.
It is in these details that we all assume we control the outcomes.
When choosing to take a long layover, or being forced to take one, travelers are simply, and literally, along for the ride.
I would push that thought even further: in this loss of control, this loss of agency, people are ripped from the over-saturation of sound, light, and information we all face on the daily.
Be it by choice or a product of the world we live, we are all inundated with a thought-deafening, brain clogging level of noise, or chatter.
I recently noticed this chatter on my drives to and from work.
As my thoughts drift in the early morning darkness or the late evening dusk, there is a volume level that, once I surpass, I lose all ability to process and think: 6 bars.Once I surpass this threshold, all semblance of conscious thought is stripped away. I sit, allowing the moments to glide by unnoticed.
But when our daily lives are structured around our 9–5, the time we let run away from us in the car is often the only moment of reprieve we get before returning home to the list of to-dos.
I have actually started to sit in silence: I take a breath and have a steak dinner. When the music is over that threshold of 6, I cannot process the day and the music at the same time: it is just too much.
This is a perfect allegory for our daily lives.
Rarely do we find ourselves able to turn off the outside noise: to take a breath, celebrate the wins, or retreat from the hectic moments in life.
Be our responsibilities to our families, friends, jobs, or the like, we balance the very real necessity to stay on a schedule and work for others with the ever present reality that the money we make is valued immensely more by companies than it is by ourselves.
So we structure our lives around the tasks we need to do in order to make money only to be bombarded by lights, sounds, and noise trying to take that money we made.
In this constant pull between giving to others and people trying to take from us, we are racked, if not drawn and quartered, every single day.
When this chatter becomes to much, when we need a moment to escape the stress of daily life, how do most de-stress?
With television that bombards us with adds?
A run with music blocking out the thoughts?
A gym session where the sounds of weights hitting the floor compete with the volume of the
music?
The list goes on.
It is so difficult to cultivate a space in our daily lives that allows for the type of silence that comes with stripping away of a faux-autonomy.
My Case for the Long Layover.
When you are sitting in the terminal, after a long layover, voluntarily or involuntarily, you are forced to simply sit and wait. You can fight, you can scream, you can yell, you can do just about whatever you want, but nothing will change.
You have no choice but to face the sound of… silence bada bum.
Though there may be sights and sounds around you, contrary to daily life, these sounds are seemingly are drowned out by the realization of just how little control you really have.
For me, this is freeing. It takes off my shoulders the perceived level of responsibility I have. As a teacher, coach, student, brother, son, boyfriend and such, the list of responsibilities are endless: notice none of these roles are directly for myself. The long layover allows me to take a breath and feel free because there is little I can do as I sit in the terminal.
Not a groundbreaking thought, I wager people love travel because, when they do travel, they do not have any responsibilities: they are relinquishing control.
We all have so many responsibilities that cause us to not be aware of all the things we are responsible for. They just kind of happen.
But, as you sit in the terminal, while you may be able to drown out the deafening noise of the silence in your mind with a book, podcast, playlist, or people watching, whatever it is, at some point your mind will become so numb you have no choice but to sit.
You can’t drown out that inner voice that gets lost in the daily hustle of life. You cannot intentionally or unintentionally bury yourself under the responsibilities that life requires.
In this moment of sitting, you are left with nothing but yourself: the inner voice you have unknowingly repressed on the drive home, at the gym, or under a mound of obligations.
For some this is refreshing, something they have longed for. For others, it is terrifying, something they try to avoid.
When I sit in the terminal, I always end up taking inventory of my life: the travels and experiences, that have lead me to the point I am at.
I end up searching my catalogue of photos and memories that remind me of, as Kid Cudi sings in his song Ghost!, “the people I’ve met and the places I’ve been are all what make me the man I so proudly am”.
Though I may only have a single picture to remind myself of the deep breath I took in celebrating myself and my hard work finishing a previously in person 2-Year Masters Degree, online, during the pandemic, with 9–5 Zooms twice a month on Saturdays with my other teaching and coaching responsibilities, without the forced time of nothingness that came from wandering the airport to find most dining options closed, I would not have any celebration at all.
So there’s my case for the long layover.
Yes, you could block off the hours from 5:00 am — 5:45 am to sit in the silence. You could work from 6:00 pm — 8:00 pm on your passion projects that you see as an investment in yourself. You could listen to your watch notification and take 5 minutes to breathe.
You could, yet, for most, we don’t.
Life does what it does.
5:00 is early, 6:00 is prime time, and 5 minutes is not nearly enough. For most, life does not
allow for the hacks circulating the web.
Instead, the next time you book a flight, save some money, arrive a bit late, and take a long layover. Your inner voice will thank you.
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