Travel Memoirs: Flying Solo

Travelling long distance for business can be very lonely. Recently, I took a 30-hour flight to Florida on a work trip. There were 3 different flights, 4 airport changes (including the airport of departure) and 2 relatively long periods of transit in New York and Frankfurt. And I am not even including the journey back home! 

At every intersection, I saw families and friends reuniting, hugging, chatting and smiling. Lone business travellers like me just ambled around sterile and commonplace airport shops, sat in airport lounges together with lots of other bored business travellers, and watched endless movies on the plane. Surrounded by so many different people, I had never felt lonelier. Yet, back home, when I am just ensconced in the love and warmth of our little family of 4 (and sometimes with our parents too!), I had never felt more contented.

I do get lots of time to reflect upon many things in life on these trips though – from trivial matters like what the kids are doing in school to deeper reflections about life in general.

While humanity is all about communication, lone business travellers often times only have the company of their own thoughts. On occasions like these, I had many conversations with myself throughout the journey and got in touch with myself again. It was a lot easier to observe beautiful things around me. Little beauties like fireworks under a full moon as the plane departed from New York . The changing multi-hued shades of sunset at 9pm on a long summer day in New York. Beautiful patches of emerald German farm land as the plane got ready to descend into Frankfurt. Watching a wakening Singapore as the soft, magical wings of a purple-hued dawn swept across our island that was aglow with the twinkling lights from the night before. 

 Lonely yes, but comfortably alone. And I relish such chances to observe the world so closely without distractions from the boisterous kids. 

My gregarious girls had talked about their fear of being alone and doing things on their own. Which is understandable at their ages. Sometimes, I wonder how we can help eradicate the fear of being alone in our children. So that peer influence may not be that much of a deal. So that they are perfectly contented – like us – wherever they are, so long as they have the companionship of a book, their eyes (for observing things around them!) and conversations with themselves. Some kids cope better with this but my kids are social beings, and I find that it is harder to encourage them to do things on their own, without the company of their friends or us. Well, let’s see how else I could encourage them….