From a Seat I Was Too Good To Occupy

COLLISION 00010

While I initially launched the Collisions series as textural evidence for travel’s transformative power at work in my own life and in the next ripple out beyond mine, I know it is much bigger than just a personal series of proof points. 

What started as a project to simply notice, catalogue and celebrate travel’s touch – all of its coincidences, nudges and encounters – has evolved into a mounting ambition to scale and mobilize a bigger movement to recognize and spread the joy of travel.  My experience is, after all, just one tessera in the larger mosaic. 

Collisions are the unplanned moments that make travel matter. A conversation that shifts something, a stranger who becomes a mirror, a place that hands us a piece of ourselves we didn't even know was missing.  Each impact reveals a truth, leaves its mark, deposits residue meant to shape not only how we move but who we become.

Before I ever tackled the topic of collisions themselves, I wanted to lay out a runway of them.  I suspected that each one, and then each one alongside the other, could far better demonstrate my intent than mere words and a philosophical framework alone.

It wasn’t until I started putting them to paper that the full potency of collisions became abundantly clear.  They are signals, catalysts, forced time-outs, a-has, McGuffins, redirects, jumpstarts, off-ramps and on-ramps.  They are inflection points, pivots and validation.  

They arrive without warning to affect us.  They have surprisingly sneaky reverberations that wash over us at some indeterminate point in time after impact, after the collision in its original form has struck.  In every collision I’ve shared, there has been an exchange of joy in the moment, but there has also been a rush of joy at the point of resurface, reflection and reapplication. 

Collisions are extraordinarily regenerative which suggests to me they really could be divine, the universe’s intervention and, most of all, truly all ours to hold and recast.

An unbelievable thing happened when I started writing this piece. A random encounter I had on a trip I took to Stockholm two summers ago mysteriously slid into view.  That would make a good Collision, I thought.  I stopped, made note of it in my content calendar and continued writing. 

But then I realized it’s not meant for June 23, it’s meant for today.  I take myself back to July 2024.

I was miserably hungover after an overindulgent dinner at Ekstedt.  My United 1K status didn’t load in the SAS system so I was assigned a window seat in the back row of the plane for the two-and-a-half-hour connecting flight to Zurich.  I was all shades of furious and feeling sorry for myself like only an entitled travel brat could. 

Then an Asian man and his young son sat down in the back row with me.  They spoke no English.  The boy was maybe five or six years old.   As our wheels lifted up, the father pointed out the window to the boy, speaking excitedly, I can only guess, about the buildings, the shrinking city below and then the clouds. 

The more the father spoke, the more the boy sat up straighter and straighter in his seat.  He giggled.  He clapped his hands together.  Their heads swiveled from the window to each other and back again.  They embraced.  Now, they were both clapping and giggling. 

And on the inside, so was I. 

From a seat I thought I was too good to occupy, I watched as this moment of joy and discovery played out just next to me.  I have taken off hundreds of times before but never with a heart that felt as light as mine did that morning.

Now, as I try to still a quivering lower lip, I can finally see that collision for the perfectly timed gift it was.

Then, and most certainly right now.