Here's the thing...

Over the course of my life I have seen any number of looks of terror. The incidences usually begin the same way, as they did this morning. People just standing around some place - including bystanders such as myself - an unmarked vehicle with no license plates pulls up and men jump out. They are usually armed...no, I take that back...they are always armed. Menacing, threatening men. They always act with an air of importance, impertinence and swagger. Sometimes they have uniforms, sometimes they don't, depending on the state sanction of their activities. They wave the guns and point them at nearly everyone in the vicinity. They begin beating someone - also usually either a bystander or someone unimportant until they get the information they want. Others who try to intervene also get beaten or a gun pointed at them. There is always yelling. Eventually, the people they want are dragged out to the car. Sometimes they are fighting; sometimes they go quietly. But they all, and alw...

“There’s a truth that’s deeper than experience. It’s beyond what we can see, or even what we feel. It’s an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We’re helpless, usually, in the fact of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn’t always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart.” - Gregory David Roberts

I like to think that there is a special state of mind into which frequent travelers often descend. You will know these people by their irksome calm when they, in the same awful travel predicament as you, watch calmly as you lose your temper. Their bags might be missing, their flight delayed, or cancelled, the airline clerk being a heinous twat and yet they stand next to you with that placid look of acceptance and love for the airline clerk, and the airline industry - and universe at large. Sometimes, I enter this state of travel zen. No, I don’t enter it…it usually descends upon me for no apparent reason and in those moments I feel calm – and somewhat superior. I’d like to think that most of my travels over the holidays I was in that state. Flight from Amsterdam cancelled…no problem. Flight to Boston cancelled…no problem. Flight to DC cancelled…no problem. I was the poster child for travel zen. But now the universe is tempting my resolve. I am set to fly DC, to Amsterdam, to Nairo...