Hi, I'm Kari, and I'm Probably Going to Hold Your Hand
How I like to introduce myself to my airplane seat mates
This past week I accompanied my person on a journey to another place and time.
Our relationship preceded the pandemic by a year and a half, but we hadn’t had the impetus to travel back before this time.
His grandmother is approaching the sunset of her life, and the stars aligned, and that was that.
I survived the vertigated ascent and descent in our flights, re-breathing the noxious flavor of my own adrenaline reflected by my kn95 as my mouth went flatly metallic. As has been my custom, I pumped Jaya Lakshmi and Ananda into my ears, chanting along WAHE GURU in Gurmukhi, a prayer of wow.
Wow, we made it.
Wow, we are flying.
(Which is better than HOLY F*CK MY FLYING IS MY BODY’S NO LANGUAGE.)
The iCloud keeps sucking the song off of my phone, and so before we take off each time I must re-download so I can loop it. Wahe Guru. Wahe Guru. Wahe Guru, Wahe Gio. In our final descent, it zipped away again, even though there was no internet to be found in the airplane mode. The real clouds came for it, I guess.
This is my mantra, as I focus on round breaths and imagine the flight filled with white-clad Kundalini spirit ninjas, throwing the fear and the nausea and the unhelpful past behind them.
It’s nice to travel with someone I know. When I travel alone, the way I often greet my seat mates is, “Hi, I’m Kari - I’m probably going to hold your hand.”
Turns out strangers - even those who seem to not like people, or seem to be consumed by the media near them - are often willing to hold my hand during turbulence, take-off, landing, and are often exceedingly kind about it. I’ve held hands with people who have barked at flight attendants, snapped at people on the other end of the phone, and otherwise ogre-d their way on board.
I’m not sure why this is so surprising - the capacity of all humans to human. People often call on me to hold space for the weirdest and most bizarre circumstances, births, deaths, in-betweens for reasons I won’t ever really understand, as I am also bark-y and snappy and ogre-like. Maybe I don’t hear the clear social signals Not To, and my willingness steps in. I cut through the bullshit of ‘happy to meet you’ and ‘what takes you to Dulles’ and into the deep end of the ocean, which is that left in the clutches of a miraculous metal tube, I am going to rely on human contact to survive.
Flying is liminal space, after all. It’s a 'between' anchored squarely in faith that the millions of minions in charge of tightening screws and forecasting weather and memorizing knobs and switches, as well as the dudes with the orange pointy sticks on the ground are all getting it done, with very near to 100% accuracy. Flying is a singular act of faith that takes the unlikeliest folks from nearly everywhere and unites them in a common goal.
If that’s not yoga, I don’t know what is.
Sat nam.
