Air Travel—and Other Everyday Miracles

What a Fifteen-Year-Old Taught Me About The Necessity of Wonder

EVEN a casual glance at the technological marvels all around (and inside) us, from self-driving cars to titanium hip replacements, leads to an inevitable conclusion: We are living in The Age of The Miraculous.

We are also living in The Age of The Meh. Wonders abound yet we respond with a collective Larry David-ish “ehh.” One day we’re marveling at these modern miracles, the next we’re shrugging—or, worse, complaining.

Take air travel. For millennia, humans have gazed heavenward and hoped, prayed, that one day they could soar with the birds. Now we do.

A Boeing 777-300 weighs some 775,000 pounds at takeoff. That is the equivalent of 163 Tesla Model S’s or, if you prefer a more natural metric, a herd of sixty African Bush Elephants. Yet this winged pachyderm soars into the air. It flies. Like a bird. And what do we do? We complain about delays or baggage fees or how the Wi-Fi signal is not quite up to snuff. Really?

I confess I sometimes fall into this annoying camp. At least I did until last week. That is when I took my fifteen-year-old goddaughter Emma for her first flight. When our taxi pulled up to New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport, Emma was ecstatic. We posed for photos under the departures board. We gazed at the Boeings and Airbuses parked on the tarmac. Even the security clearance held its own kind of fascination.

We boarded and took our seats. Naturally, I ensured she had a window seat. It dawned on me: I was once a window-seat person myself.

I still remember my first airline flight at age ten. Wearing my inaugural suit, a powder blue polyester abomination with matching clip-on tie, I gazed out the window from takeoff to landing, soaking it all up. Now I choose an aisle seat for easy lavatory access. This must stop. The heart is a more vital organ than the bladder.

Emma was enthralled. She was enthralled by the safety briefing and she was enthralled by the seatback videos. She was enthralled, and worried, by the various sounds emitted by the Boeing. I used to pilot planes myself—not gargantuan Boeings but considerably more diminutive Cessnas, so I deployed my best everything-is-under-control-folks pilot’s voice to explain that, for instance, that creaking sound was the baggage being loaded onto the plane. That high-pitched whistle was the APU (auxiliary power unit) firing up, followed by the much throatier growl of the massive General Electric engines coming on line.

Our departure was delayed slightly, but this did not perturb Emma one bit. If anything, she was delighted; the delay elongated the frisson of her first flight. Finally, we were cleared for takeoff and our winged pachyderm roared down the runway, faster and faster, until we were airborne. Emma’s eyes fixed on the window and remained there for the duration of our two-hour flight to Mumbai.

Puffy, cumulonimbus clouds populated the sky. One looked like a bear, Emma declared. Another looked like a unicorn, a third like a car, a fourth like a baby. It was not only the sights that were new to her. So too were the sensations. The amplified G-forces as the pilot banked into a turn, the clogged ears (I assured her this was normal and she was not going deaf.) Then there was the turbulence. “Like a roller coaster,” she said. “My stomach was swinging.” Not to worry, I said. The plane can handle a lot rougher air.

Emma’s capacity for wonder floored me. Not only in the air, either. Back on terra firma in Delhi, she spent a good ten minutes watching the washing machine in my Airbnb, as if it were Netflix. How has she retained the capacity to be amazed by the quotidian when it is all I can do to get through the day without slipping into a deep and persistent funk?

Rachel Carson, best known as the author of the 1960s environmental manifesto, Silent Spring, offers one possible answer. In her lesser known work, The Sense of Wonder, she writes:

A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years.

I realize it’s easy to romanticize the world of a child, a world filled with monsters as well as fairies. Still, I believe they have much to teach us about a particular way of being in the world, one with unlimited access to wonder.

So, here is my travel advice: Book a window seat. Always. Stare out that window for absurdly long periods of time. See what creatures, large or small, the clouds conjure. Feel free to audibly “ooh” and “ahh." Should any of your fellow passengers look at you askance, just smile knowingly and tell them Emma sent you.