Up in the air
The next time you find yourself on a flight, look around at your fellow passengers after takeoff. Notice how many of them never leave the ground. Their faces are still buried in their smartphones or laptops, their fingers are still firing off emails and their backs are still hunched over the latest breaking news. It seems we no longer check any of our baggage; it follows us up into the sky and around the globe. Our worries, our cares, our concerns, our commitments — they sail through the air as we do.
But it wasn’t always that way. It used to be that everything you left on the ground stayed there, and everything to come upon arrival would have to wait. A flight served as an odd haven away from the world, one shared with strangers and strange things. Things that happened on flights — conversations had, magazines read, dreams dreamed — were atypical, finite occurrences, outliers from the familiar patterns of everyday life.
There was something about being in the sky that made us feel unattached to any one place, sailing across the earth in a beacon of manmade achievement. It only made sense that we spent this detached state often reading a magazine that was so clearly from another planet. The products in SkyMall were perfect for momentarily leaving the world and its norms. As you sailed through the air without a care, maybe — just maybe — you could convince yourself to buy a cat toilet or a handmade Irish walking stick.
SkyMall represented that unique giddiness you can’t help but feel when a plane takes off, the repeated wonder — ever so slight, for some — at seeing the clouds from a new vantage point and the excitement of putting your life on pause for a while. But all that is over now. It filed for bankruptcy last week with the magazine we all have connected to one memory or another.
We may be saying goodbye to that isolated sanctuary of silence that once existed high in the sky.
