Back in 2019 I was flying back to Arizona after a job interview in California and at that point I had already not gotten several jobs I’d interviewed for and I was feeling pretty bad about myself. I ended up getting the job in California, it’s the one I have now. The plan had landed and we were sitting on the tarmac and I was sitting in the back of the plane because I prefer to sit in the back of the plane and I was watching over the top of the seats as the passengers did that slow and frustrating thing where they both take forever to gather their stuff and also try to push past the people in front of them. You can learn a lot about a person by watching how they behave during this small moment. You can learn who is organized or not, who is pushy, who is patient, who is kind, who is self-important.
I was sitting at the vert back of the cabin and I could overhear a couple of the flight attendants chatting about what’s next and what city they would end their day in that day and I thought for a moment that I would enjoy that life. The notion of spending the day hoping from city to city, looking at hundreds or thousands of strangers, getting to watch them all in these liminal moments, getting to study strangers for a living, that all seemed really appealing to me. Plus, it would be an excuse to live a slim and streamlined life, since my days would have to fit into a single bag that I traveled with each and every day. I imagined having a cool little studio apartment that I barely ever lived in. I imagined nights at odd bars in strange cities. Having friends in lots of places. Having a life that took place mostly in the air.
Obviously I’m romanticizing that life, but I was having a tough time then getting the kind of work that I wanted and so it was probably healthy to think outside the box of my own expectations. After all, people do live a life like the one I’d imagined. Probably it is more grueling and stressful than I’d imagined. I’d heard before that flight attendants are actually extensively trained and actually highly skilled and have to be knowledgeable about their aircraft, but that they spend 90% of their time doing 10% of what they’re trained for. Most of the time they’re sky butlers, but every once and a while they have to save someone having a heart attack. What a weird job.
That weirdness appealed to me and, if I’m being honest, kind of still does. I even looked into it some, but before I could spend much time on it, I was offered this job and then it was off to California to do what I am doing now.
And lucky me, because a few months later Covid hit and lots and lots of airline employees lost their jobs and the ones that didn’t were hurtling around the skies in sealed steel tubes with strangers who were so poor at risk assessment that they were on the plane in the first place. It must have been complete terrifying hell there for a while. I really feel for people who had to do that work, it must have been a total trauma and I haven’t really heard people talk about that. Honestly, we have kind of stopped having discussions about the sacrifices that front-line workers made. Probably because as we draw nearer the end of the pandemic, if we talked about them more, we might be asked to actually reward them in some way, which I think we should do, but which this country will never do because we are kind of a nation of assholes. But I digress, that is a topic for another time.
As we creep ever so slowly back toward some kind of normalcy, I have been thinking more about a life spent in the air. My own employer has been making plans about returning to face-to-face work and there are committees and proposals and waivers and union negotiations and clarifications of terms and underneath it all is the implication that some work simply can’t be done from home even though that work has been getting done at home for 15 months. I have been thinking more about a life spent in the air perhaps because we are approaching a point where many of our lives will return to something like normal, like we are all coming in for a landing, or maybe we already have landed (I remember hearing the whooshing noise of a 737 engine when I got my second vaccine injection) and so now our whole society is just sitting on the tarmac and we are learning a lot about each other while we sit here waiting. We are stuck here waiting and thinking about all the things we’ll need to do once we deplane. We are thinking about the lives we live when we are not up in the air, we are getting ready for our return and so we are thinking about what exactly we are returning to.
It is good to think on what we want to return to and what we don’t
It is good to spend this time thinking on the other lives we could be living, it is good to think on the world of possibilities that will be opening to us as the world is reopening to us.
A lot of lives will be completely different a year from now, not just because of the vaccines, but because of what coming back to life will mean for so many of us. A lot of marriages are going to end. A lot of people are going to quit jobs that they realized they don’t want. A lot of weird little businesses are going to get started because people will realize that life is brief and if they really do want to open that cupcake shop, they had better get on it.
I doubt I will become a flight attendant any time soon, but I’m certainly thinking on it. And that is a good thing.
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