Sep 2016
Coming up for air
All manner of characters congregate in airport terminals, there's simply no scene sweeter than a lovesick twenty something staring intently at the door arrivals stroll through. A dozen red roses in hand, and a palatable sense of anticipation and to think, they say romance is dead. I would sit at my desk and watch the same stories play out at least a dozen times a week. The international student, the hopelessly devoted and but of course the people bound by babies and obligation. The spectrum of human emotions on display is by far the most attractive aspect of my occupation, I use the term occupation loosely. I enjoyed talking and asking and watching the smiling faces. If anyone tells you airports are depressing places they've clearly never spent too much time seated outside arrivals it's impossible (for me at least) to not feel lifted by another's joy, call it osmosis.
To most ambitiously minded young people, there is little sense of anticipation for a life lived ordinarily, who dreams of excel spreadsheets? Who tells themselves that in fifteen years time they will pass the same faces from school in shopping centres or swimming pools without batting an eye lid. Though for the lucky few born where they can stay without fear of hunger, persecution or poverty it is hard to appreciate properly the advantages they are born with. It's easy to look past the place you call home. You spend forever thinking of distant lands with foreign food without ever really giving any time to appreciate the place you were born, the satellite town off an anonymous motorway people have traversed continents to call there new home. It always amazes me how as the people, living with the fruit of centuries worth of social progress, still yearn and complain incessantly. I suppose it's a collective cross to bare for all concerned, we who were lucky enough to be born here, take for granted the things people leave lives behind for. Technological advances have created an almost impossible situation to anyone who happened to live and did before the Internets inception. The almost instantaneous access to news and information has not expanded intelligence or fuelled fires of deep interest, a constant access to news has only served to harden us significantly to the world in which we inhabit. I think it would be short sighted and remarkably naive to say we are the first of human kind to grow complacent, admittedly it's not great but it's a lot closer than it was for anyone before us. For some it takes a flirtation with disaster, or the loss of a loved one to realise exactly how little we appreciate exactly what we have, for me at least it was a few months working in an airport.
All manner of characters congregate in airport terminals, there's simply no scene sweeter than a lovesick twenty something staring intently at the door arrivals stroll through. A dozen red roses in hand, and a palatable sense of anticipation and to think, they say romance is dead. I would sit at my desk and watch the same stories play out at least a dozen times a week. The international student, the hopelessly devoted and but of course the people bound by babies and obligation. The spectrum of human emotions on display is by far the most attractive aspect of my occupation, I use the term occupation loosely. I enjoyed talking and asking and watching the smiling faces. If anyone tells you airports are depressing places they've clearly never spent too much time seated outside arrivals it's impossible (for me at least) to not feel lifted by another's joy, call it osmosis.
To most ambitiously minded young people, there is little sense of anticipation for a life lived ordinarily, who dreams of excel spreadsheets? Who tells themselves that in fifteen years time they will pass the same faces from school in shopping centres or swimming pools without batting an eye lid. Though for the lucky few born where they can stay without fear of hunger, persecution or poverty it is hard to appreciate properly the advantages they are born with. It's easy to look past the place you call home. You spend forever thinking of distant lands with foreign food without ever really giving any time to appreciate the place you were born, the satellite town off an anonymous motorway people have traversed continents to call there new home. It always amazes me how as the people, living with the fruit of centuries worth of social progress, still yearn and complain incessantly. I suppose it's a collective cross to bare for all concerned, we who were lucky enough to be born here, take for granted the things people leave lives behind for. Technological advances have created an almost impossible situation to anyone who happened to live and did before the Internets inception. The almost instantaneous access to news and information has not expanded intelligence or fuelled fires of deep interest, a constant access to news has only served to harden us significantly to the world in which we inhabit. I think it would be short sighted and remarkably naive to say we are the first of human kind to grow complacent, admittedly it's not great but it's a lot closer than it was for anyone before us. For some it takes a flirtation with disaster, or the loss of a loved one to realise exactly how little we appreciate exactly what we have, for me at least it was a few months working in an airport.
