Growing used to airplanes

It is easy to get used to air travel. My (rather chatty) seatmate today on a Detroit-Amsterdam flight remarked how I was so engrossed in the article I was reading that I barely noticed takeoff (I’m still more aware of them than my airline-pilot’s-daughter-wife, who once slept through what remains the worst takeoff I’ve ever experienced). Routines become set. As so often happens, the abnormal (crossing an ocean in six hours) becomes normal.

Yet airline travel isn’t normal. It wasn’t that long ago that crossing an ocean was a once-in-a-lifetime event, a severance of ties on one continent to settle on another. Today, masses move back and forth. My neighbor’s today included a Polish-born engineer working with Chrysler in Detroit returning to Poland for a week’s visit to his mother. A clearly very wealthy Indian family was visiting relatives in Mumbai. An Iraqi Orthodox Christian woman was visiting her relatives in Jordan. These were just a few stories overheard in snippets of conversation. Yet each story – in and of itself – is rather extraordinary. Each of these stories would have been nearly unimaginable 30 years ago.

I still remember the first time I heard a family speaking Spanish among themselves in the local Rink’s discount store in Lima, Ohio circa 1980. Things foreign were unusual in that world. A bit startling even. Even there, however, globalization is real. The polyglot nature of a place like Amsterdam, where I write, reaches another level, where Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas collide and mix into a patois that is the new Dutch normal.

Again, the abnormal through most of human history (the extreme mixing of people in mega-cities) becomes normal. All indications are that we still stand near the beginning of an arc of the greatest wave of urbanization and globalization the world has ever known. The article in which I was engrossed during takeoff was about the transformation of the Indian city of Surat in the state of Gujarat. This city of 4.5 million today (India’s eighth most populous) is forecast to surpass 9 million by 2025, surpassing the populations of both London and New York proper. Some theorize that mega-cities like Delhi, Mumbai, and Shanghai could become the core of true megalopolises stretching for hundreds of miles and encompassing 50-60 million people. This is no longer the stuff of science fiction, but the emerging reality of Asia and beyond.  

I often wonder what the effects of these remarkable changes are on our human minds and hearts. We are remarkably adaptable creatures. Yet it seems to me that our natures are also change averse, at least in part. How fast of a clip of change can humans sustain emotionally, mentally, and spiritually? How do megalopolises of 60 million sustain themselves, both in physical terms but also in human terms? Change is happening so quickly in today’s world that we can become a bit immune, as I was reminded on my flight today. Sometimes, it seems to me, we need to step back from what seems normal and think about how abnormal it is. We need to contemplate what it might all mean.