The demise of ‘safe travels’
How many times a day did we used to find ourselves saying or texting the words, “Safe travels” to others, or having them sent to us as we secured our seat belts? Over the last month, that phrase has exited our lexicon faster than “cassette tape” or “Y2K” ever did.
We suddenly live in a radically shrunken world. After decades of long-distance travel becoming cheaper, safer, more comfortable and more reliable, the coronavirus pandemic has suddenly dragged it back into the space it occupied for most of history: Forbidding and disorienting, filled with dangers both known and unknown. In 1950, travel statistics show, international airports around the world recorded about 25 million arrivals. In 2018, that number was 1.4 billion — a 56-fold increase. Over that time, travel became almost a right and a duty: Our path to a wider education, a broadening of our horizons. Suddenly, those who showed no interest in travel were considered incurious and out of sync with the time.
And then came the pandemic, which was carried rapidly around the world on the wings of the very same travel network that tied our globe together. Suddenly the word “travel” pulses in our minds not with the familiar associations of pleasure, anticipation and escape, but with a red warning light. Things may never be the same again.
At the level of jobs and livelihoods, or the supply side of the travel industry, the shutdown of humanity’s freedom of movement is undoubtedly a crisis that will take years to resolve. But, at the personal level, is there a silver lining? Could a life without travel be a path to personal growth and development?
One of the most wonderful things we took from travel was that it gave us new eyes for our daily lives; the world to which we had become accustomed. Everyday experience, obscured and overwhelmed by a world of a million glittering distractions and possibilities, suddenly becomes magical again. Forced to pay attention to the world around us, we find in it wonders to which we had long been oblivious. Reconnecting in a new way with one’s immediate environment is the most rewarding journey of all because it can reshape us at the very level at which we spend most of our time.
Our enforced break from our almost compulsive forms of work and travel has also been good for the world. For at least a decade now, we have known that our mode and scale of travel, even if thrilling personally and the source of endless economic growth, was unsustainable and was running down the planet’s resources. Yet, as long as change was voluntary, we could not bring ourselves to do it.
But it turns out that a mass lockdown is, environmentally speaking, also a form of mass action. In decades to come, we will come to view March and April 2020 as a point of reference for how to fight the battle against climate change.
And perhaps this time will also become a reset point in our travel practices — not because of what the pandemic forced us to do, but because of what it taught us about what was possible.
Chandrahas Choudhury is a writer based in New Delhi. His work also appears in Bloomberg View and Foreign Policy. Twitter: @Hashestweets
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