In The Air Again
As I write this post, I’m 30,000 feet in the air, on an American Airlines flight headed to New Jersey. The last time I was on a plane was, funnily enough, exactly a year and a half ago, to the day.
If you’d told me back then that it would be 18 months before I’d fly again, I’d have told you that you were nuts. I was that hardened road warrior, on a flight at least every other week, sometimes every week for months at a time. In fact, the last time I’d gone a year and a half without flying was quite literally in the late 80s. Plus, come on, this COVID thing wasn’t going to be that bad, really...give it a few months and we’d all be back to normal.
Reality (and the pandemic) had other ideas, of course, and grounded I was - as were we all. And I have to say, it was great. I loved being home all the time. Sleeping in my own bed for weeks on end was no longer a novel concept. I figured out how to productively work from home. Even my wife and kids liked having me around all the time.
The last several months though, I’d begun to get that feeling, a hankering, if you will, that I wanted to get back on the road again. Maybe not to the same extent as before - week in, week out - but certainly to be going places periodically, for work or otherwise. As fate would have it, work required it, and so here I am, at 30,000 feet.
Mind you, the decision to fly again wasn’t arrived at without plenty of consideration. After the anxiety, uncertainty and the trauma that was (is) the pandemic, I had real concerns about putting myself in an airtight cylinder for a couple of hours along with more than a hundred other folks.
But I made the decision having assessed - at least to my own personal satisfaction - the risks. I’m double vaccinated and generally careful in terms of my movements and behavior. I observe all safety protocols and don’t believe wearing a mask is an affront to my personal freedoms. I also looked at what has been written about flying commercially and the general safety measures the airlines have put in place. And on balance, I felt pretty good about it. (This was supported by plenty of anecdotal evidence of friends I trust who’d all flown in the past several months.)
All of which suggested that if I had to fly, so long as I was safe and observed the necessary protocols myself, it should be alright.
Of course, to be clear, it’s not that there’s zero risk. That’s simply not possible anymore. My own view is that we’re in an age where it will never be a case of “zero Covid-19” but rather “manageable COVID-19”. Like the flu, we’ll all have to learn to live with it in our worlds and manage it as best as we can - which to be clear, means getting vaccinated, wearing a mask when required and being thoughtful and careful in our ‘social’ choices.
But that’s pretty much life in general, though, isn’t it?
There’s an “odds” element to everything we do in life. Nothing we do is guaranteed and we make trade-offs all the time. The key is to be thoughtful, informed and considerate in our actions as we decide what it is we’re comfortable living with.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go munch on my free bag of pretzels...
