boarding gate

I have a ritual in airports, and it’s been nearly 20 months since I last enacted it. This time the ritual includes a mask and hand sanitizer and Covid tests and a little less peace, but all the same it feels like a comfortable home to be back in my flying skin. 

In my ritual, I read the first chapter of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, which writes, “The sea that calls all things unto her calls me, and I must embark… A voice cannot carry the tongue and the lips that gave it wings. Alone must it seek the ether.” And as I read this chapter about leaving when you know you must, I listen to Brandi Carlile’s The Eye, which has a line, “you might make it further if you learned to stay.” I’ve had the great privilege to have sat in many airports so far in my life, frequently about to jet off on my own, and every time I’ve stayed and every time I’ve gone it’s felt critical that I create this space at the boarding gate to intentionally sit in the tension between remaining and leaving, settling down and setting forth, comfort and challenge, consistency and change. 

Gibran also writes, “How shall I go in peace and without sorrow? Nay, not without a wound in spirit shall I leave this city,” and Carlile also sings “I am a sturdy soul.” And it’s important for me to let those tensions wash over me, too, as I wait in the nebulous in between. 

I find myself in both of those tensions as I sit in Chicago concourse B, an hour from boarding a plane to London, setting off on a multi-country journey through my PhD over the next three years. In many ways, these tensions have been the most constant feature of my ever-changing, ever-moving life.

During this long-awaited and long-delayed and slightly-different ritual today, I’m aware that my soul would never have found such sturdiness had it not stayed put in the last 20 months. And, as a result of staying put, I feel the sorrow of leaving a home with a garden I could tend to and watch evolve over two years, of moving away from the ability to babysit nieces and nephews and stop by for family dinners, of having to start the process of community-building over again. And, that sturdy soul tells me with sureness that it’s time for me to embark, that I must seek the ether now.

I think, as many of those of us most fortunate receive vaccines and move into physically communal living again, we are in a similar, nebulous in between. We are holding back and venturing out, we are returning to old friends and setting new boundaries, reverting to comfort and striving for new priorities, we are awash in sadness of all that has been lost and in hope for the growing horizon. 

I hope that as we move through this in between to a new era of living amongst one another, that we might individually and collectively take a moment to intentionally sit in the tension, to courageously ask ourselves where in our lives we might make it further by staying put and how we must say goodbye to seek the ether. I hope we don’t run away from this moment of pause at the boarding gate, asking ourselves feel the sorrows so that we might find sturdiness in spirit as we go forward. 

How will you stay? Where might you embark? How could you sit in your tensions to sturdy your soul?