Parting Shot:

Frequent Flyer

In the last month, I’ve travelled about 29,000 kilometres. Those kilometres translate into:

• seven take-offs;

• seven landings (thank goodness!);

• one flight cancellation from Hong Kong to Los Angeles; • one flight delay from Washington DC to Kansas City; • 2,805 minutes up in the air;

• three charley horses;

• four viewings of The Greatest Showman;

• three books;

• one dinner with two college roommates;

• two days with my parents and sisters;

• 24 hours with a best friend;

• ten days of missing my husband and my dog; and

• twelve seatmates, including a federal marshal, a rabbi, one Hawaiian moving to DC (poor guy), a reverend, two Americans going on their first cruise around Asia, a young couple with well-behaved twin babies, an older woman travelling with her friends for their first “autumn break” (not sure if she meant their age or the season) to Mexico, and another couple who spoke no English but smiled understandingly when I used charades to indicate I needed out of the seat row for a bathroom break.

Travelling, while a privilege, is exhausting and takes longer to recover the older I get, not to mention it throws my body into a tailspin for days. We won’t even discuss my closet and the fact that my luggage will remain partially packed for five days. But I do it for those hours with the people I love – and, as an added bonus, find myself spending minutes with people that I discover I like. These people rarely look like me, talk like me and hardly ever think like me. They are fascinating. They have stories and experiences and names and cultures that unfold before me like a rich tapestry of sounds and colours and textures I’ve never experienced together before.

Living an expat life can feel like you’re living in a vacuum. But as much as I talk about my distaste for “people-ing”, I’m grateful for these interactions, planned and unplanned, that force me to see a new perspective, to get outside of myself and my self-imposed walls.

Don’t let the news media’s fear-mongering or social media arguments over politics fool you. It’s a big, small world out there and people are still looking for positive moments to share – be it sharing the armrest on a 16-hour flight or sharing your hard-earned knowledge on an expat Facebook page. You never know when your journey will inspire another to step outside of their box. And just think, you could be visiting them on your next trip.