In which I use my passport! And spend eighty hours in airports and airplanes!
I’ve been thinking about writing this post for most of a month now, because I wasn’t sure how, since it wasn’t really a touristy trip. I went to see my Sadguru, an enlightened person, an avatar, for spiritual purposes, and most of what I have to observe was the ways my mind does what it does and how I reacted to that. It’s not like I went to any restaurants or shows or on any hikes or cruises.
The trip was Walla Walla to Seattle to Vancouver to Delhi to Trivandrum. I never left the airports, and it took a couple days each way. Absolutely exhausting. The shape of the trip was dictated primarily by politics; from what I’ve been told (by a Keralan living in Canada I met on a return flight) you’d typically rather go through Dubai.
The way over I was exhausted in every way: physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. My relationship has its struggles, I’ve been in the same entry-level job for six years with no promotions or recent raises, I’m older and fatter than I’ve ever been, and I live a life of, essentially, laziness and dissipation. I read a lot, I sleep a lot, I drink too much, I don’t bother to have a social life, and while I know the shape of my life would be perfect for sadhana I just don’t do as much as I wish. I was unhappy in every quarter. Which is why I wanted to go see Amma so bad. Get my priorities straight. You spend a lot of your evolution believing in doing things, but then comes the realization you’re not doing anything, you’re not the doer, and yet you have to do things to achieve states, and it’s all some bullshit Buddhist koan, and you need your guru.
After determining that I wanted to go and why, with literally no effort on my part, everything just fell into place. Suddenly there was money to go, and tickets, and a month off work with zero push back, and literally everything I needed was just… provided to me. (Thanks, dad!)
~+~+~
So one morning around three AM we got in the car and went to ALW, which is my favorite airport because you can go from the door all the way through security in literally four minutes. (I hate airport security for its waste, irritation, and ineffectiveness. It’s theatre and its tedious.)
Anyway, flight to Seattle. Few hours layover, I got a coffee but I don’t think I ate. Then flight to Vancouver, which is a really well-done airport. Nice to look at, immigration was a breeze, wifi, all the kiosks worked, nice art.
Flight to Delhi was either fourteen or sixteen hours, I can’t remember which, and by then my extremities were bloated and I was miserable because the seats are for takeoff and landing, not a dozen-plus hours of actual flight, and I’m too old and fat now to get my feet underneath me or curl up. I did sleep but it was terrible quality, weird and jittery.
The food was pretty good, though. They fed and watered us probably four times. I had a window seat and so had to bother my row mates twice to get out, walk, stretch, and pee. The bathrooms were still familiar plane-style weird little closets with toilet paper.
Weirdest part of the whole journey was that it never got dark. You’re just flying over the lid of the world with the sun. So, so many hours of bright daylight.
Then another few hours in Delhi, to get out through immigration and back in through security. The Delhi airport is a fucking people-moving disaster, the signage is either not there or useless, and both times I went through it I had no idea where I was supposed to be going in spite of being in possession of a reasonably high intelligence and a general concept of how to get through an airport. The airport employees I asked were contemptuous (which I do understand, I work customer service too, and being asked the same fucking question over and over does get annoying) and unforthcoming and rude.
The immigration guys were bored, grumpy, gruff, and slow. Yes, I had all my documents ready: passport, boarding pass, visa. Your job sucks, whatever, at least you’re sitting down for it, you huge baby.
Security in India is segregated by sex, so you give your bags to the machine for scanning and then have to hike way over to where the women are being screened, leaving all your belongings utterly unsupervised, to be wanded in private in a cubicle by a female soldier-slash-cop. (These were friendly and pleasant, and one even complimented me on my hair.) Then at peak disorientation, tired in a strange airport where you don’t understand the majority of the languages, you have to remember which carousel has your bags and figure out how to get back sans signage. It’s a trip.