It was late morning as I sat in an emptyish Munich airport cafe, bleary from a transatlantic flight. Six hours loomed before my connection to Sofia. I decided to spend the time drinking coffee and feeling sorry for myself. A smartly dressed older man and woman came to the table beside mine and laid down their carry-on bags, coats, water bottles and backpacks.
After a brief discussion in what sounded like Danish, the man and the woman began reassembling their belongings. I glanced, but was lasered into Wordle, determined to keep my winning streak going despite the jet lag brain fog. When I looked up a few moments later at what was their table, I saw an empty water bottle, a crumpled napkin and a small leather bag, the kind people use to carry money and passports when they travel.
Despite the state-sanctioned suspicion, we are encouraged to brandish with strangers when we are in airports, I picked up the bag and walked into the concourse. The couple was nearby, ogling muffins in a bakery window. I approached the woman, said nothing and handed her the bag. She looked relieved and sheepish. I smiled at her and walked back to my seat at the café.
A few moments later the woman approached my table. She had the countenance of a librarian. She thanked me, stepped closer and reached for my hands. As we clasped, she said, “I shall think of you on this day when I travel. I shall think of your kindness.” We held hands for a beat longer. Then she turned and walked away. My eyes teared at how beautiful and necessary and tender it had been to connect in a wilderness of strangers.
Aesop, the ancient Greek storyteller, once said, “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” Aesop’s idea sounds like a primo blurb for a self-help book, but honestly, those small acts of kindness are a bitch to muster. Especially when I travel.
Whatever particles of glamour and ease that may have percolated the air travel that I remember from 20 years ago have evaporated. My usual air travel survival strategy is to hate everyone, avoid interaction and endure. I am the surly and silent passenger in 27C with ear plugs burrowed into her skull and an eye mask that says Leave Me Alone. Post-pandemic bad behaviors, FAA glitches, apocalyptic weatherpaloozas, yipping dogs in carry-on bags, price tags on what used to be complimentary onboard services, ample bodies spilling into my seat. I turn inward, cataloguing my petty miseries. I am a rock; I am an island. I am myopic.
What I have difficulty seeing is that all the factors that make air travel so fraught are also the factors that are ripe for small acts of kindness and the rippling goodwill they bring. As individual as I’ve been trained to be in my culture, air travel plops me into a churn of humanity, a Petri dish of nearness, a likelihood of unpredictability. It offers conditions ripe for a reminder of ubuntu, a Zulu word that expresses the idea of interconnectivity. South African human rights activist Desmond Tutu said that ubuntu speaks of the very essence of being human. “It is to say that my humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours. We say a person is a person through other persons.”
Remembering our interconnectivity—my interconnectivity–is what returning that forgotten bag encouraged me to do. So did Lloyd.
About eight hours before I sat in that Munich airport café, I met Lloyd in the Newark airport. Lloyd was behind the Lufthansa service counter when I told him that my late arrival into Newark had caused me to miss my original flight. Could I be rebooked? I was frantic and joyless. Lloyd listened patiently. When I finished, he buttoned his suit jacket, straightened his posture and announced in a booming, theatrical voice, “Fear not, fair maiden, for I shall come to your rescue and book you onto a later flight. All will be taken care of forthwith.”
Several people around me laughed in delight. As he pecked at his computer, rerouting my future, I felt myself in a new ecology of air travel—enfolded. Reveling, not enduring. I was a person who is a person through other persons.
It was everything. It is everything.
