Stillness in the Air

A diary of departures and passing landscapes

India. Kazakhstan. Uzbekistan. Stepping once more into a plane.

And each time, it feels as though life comes to a halt. For a few suspended hours, I trust it to this metal body carried by the wind, and wait quietly to be brought back into the ordinary rhythm of things. Calm settles as the ground drifts away.

Beside me, a man dozes, barely disturbed by the gusts shaking the aircraft, and a young woman loses herself in the glow of her phone. Once the unease of takeoff passes, I slip into a long tunnel outside of time, its slow drift strangely comforting.

I let my thoughts loosen, open a book, or do nothing at all for hours, as if I’d stepped out of the world, moving through a narrow passage between two lives, where nothing feels more accessible than myself and the stream of thoughts I scatter across a notebook.

On the road again, the small anxiety of setting out vanishes. Every journey begins this way: with a tangle of contradictory impulses. Something in us, curiosity, a pull toward the horizon, a thirst for elsewhere, mingles with the melancholy of departure and the fear of never returning. And still, we go.

Through the window, I look once more, as I have for years, at the pale sky where cotton clouds gather and disperse in slow, eternal ballets. I watch them carefully, analyzing every detail, trying to grasp their secret, and I feel rising in me the certainty that the world below will remain forever unreachable.

I study this small traveling microcosm, fleeting, fascinating and monotonous all at once. A random constellation of strangers, each drawn toward a place known or unknown. There are as many ways of traveling as there are travelers.

Some people are perfectly content to wake each day to the same view framed by their windows. They wouldn’t be unhappy on the road, but it leaves them untouched. Travel or not, they inhabit the everyday. They notice, better than anyone, the subtle shifts of green in a forest they’ve walked a hundred times, or recognize the bird that returns each year to nest at the back of the garden. I’ve met a few like that. As for me, try as I might, I’m not one of them. Not yet.

From time to time, you meet those who travel with abandon, only to discover they were perhaps better off at home. Abroad, everything feels slightly askew, out of place, strangely uncomfortable. New beauty fades quickly, giving way to a slight irritation. They sway between wonder and weariness, enchantment and aversion. Is that what I am? Still, there is sweetness in the thought of home: one’s own bed, one’s own quiet. But soon enough impatience returns, the daily rhythm bores them, and they set out again, driven by this restlessness that never quite satisfies.

And then there are those who travel out of necessity: a family to reach, a childhood landscape to reclaim, a job waiting somewhere else. Their suitcases overflow with things carried back; there is no time for idleness or wonder. The moment the plane touches down, my neighbors rush toward the exit. For them, the journey is nothing more than a familiar loop, repeated over and over.

In the midst of all this, I’m never quite sure where I belong. I sometimes dread departures, yet I love the road itself. As one moves forward, the mind grows porous; it yields to the strange sensation of being crossed by the world, and of gathering it to oneself as it shifts and alters. Unlike the train, the plane deprives me of that long, unbroken contact with the earth. At the slightest break in the clouds, I lean toward the window to guess at the lands drifting by beneath us, fields, forests and deserts unfolding in silence. Over the Arabian Peninsula, the sea of sand stretches endlessly, punctured here and there by oil wells that look, from up high, like tiny mounds left by moles.

And every new place becomes, for a while, and once made familiar, a kind of shelter, where I recover the small rituals I depend on. Coffee at a kitchen table, watching the quiet growth of things outside; books waiting on a shelf or in a bag. I’ve come to understand that these routines, so dear to the refuge I’ve built, please me just as much when they replay themselves elsewhere. They require almost nothing: a notebook, a pen, a camera. And suddenly, in a plane or in hostel room, the ritual reforms itself, as if the whole world were offering room for it.

What reason, then, is there to take to the road? Perhaps only this: the sunsets along mountain ridges, the steppe sliding past a train window, those rare moments when my heart finally rests. The long days of walking toward the unknown, which welcomes us and lets us reclaim, again and again, a wild and mysterious world. There, I find a little of myself, and, paradoxically, cease at last to imagine I stand at its center