My travel itinerary to UN-Habitat’s eleventh World Urban Forum (WUF11) was never going to be elegant.
There was a six-hour layover in Vancouver, BC—which feels particularly absurd when you live in Seattle—followed by an eight-hour layover in Frankfurt. Then, assuming everything went according to plan, I still had to figure out how to get from Kraków to Katowice for the gathering.
Everything did not go according to plan.
Like thousands of travelers this summer, my carefully constructed itinerary began unraveling almost immediately. My flight from Vancouver to Frankfurt was delayed about an hour and a half. For me, it was mostly an inconvenience; I had such a long layover in Frankfurt that I could absorb the delay. But many people around me could not. They were already doing the anxious arithmetic of missed connections, rearranged plans, hotel reservations, people waiting at airports, weddings, meetings, vacations, and reunions.
Travel reminds you how many lives intersect inside a single departure board.
I arrived in Frankfurt, and at first everything appeared normal. My flight to Kraków was still listed.
I should probably confess here that the Frankfurt airport and I have never quite understood each other. Germany has earned an extraordinary reputation for engineering and efficiency, which makes FRA something of a mystery to me. I find the signage confusing, the distances surprising, and the buses shuttling passengers across the tarmac rather warm on a summer day. Perhaps the problem is me. But I now understand why experienced travelers advise leaving generous connection times in Frankfurt.
Still, my flight was there on the board. I made my way from Terminal A to Terminal B, found Gate 19, got something to eat, and, with hours to spare, took a little nap.
When I woke up, something felt different.
There were fewer people sitting near the gate than there had been before I fell asleep. I wandered over to the departure board.
My flight was gone. Canceled! And it was not the only one. The flight board was filling with cancellations.
All around the terminal, people were staring upward, checking phones, calling loved ones, gathering children and luggage, trying to figure out what to do next.
I immediately joined the customer-service queue and began imagining alternatives. What cities could I fly to that might get me close enough to Katowice? Could I take a train? A bus? Rent a car? Carpool? Hitchhike? Bicycle?
At that point, pretty much everything was on the table.
I started texting Lynette, who became my remote travel agent, researching possibilities from thousands of miles away.
And then something unexpected happened.
The line became a little community.
I joined the queue around 3:15 in the afternoon and finally left it at about 9:50 that evening—just shy of seven hours. When I joined, I would estimate that the line already stretched the equivalent of two long city blocks. It grew considerably longer behind us.
But the people around me were remarkable.
We began learning one another’s stories. We held places so someone could use the restroom or stretch their legs. We watched luggage. We shared information and rumors about flights. I picked up snacks and water for a few people. Strangers began caring for strangers simply because, for those hours, we belonged to one another.
For the most part, at least in my little section of the line, people were remarkably patient.
And the airline staff were extraordinary.
When I finally reached the counter, the agent who helped me seemed almost impossibly calm. He spoke about his monastery, and there was something almost monastic about his presence: attentive, unhurried even while moving quickly, fully present to the person standing in front of him. He could not repair the airline industry. He could not un-cancel the flights. He could not make more planes or staff magically appear.
He simply attended to what was actually within his power to do.
Watching him, I realized that I had been trying to practice something similar for the previous seven hours.
This experience was not mine to control. But my response was.
So I tried to notice the people around me. I wondered about where they were going and who might be waiting for them. I found myself especially noticing parents with exhausted children, older travelers, and people with disabilities for whom seven hours standing in an airport line was far more than an inconvenience. I tried, quietly, to hold them in prayer and bless them.
And I tried to imagine the people on the other side of the counter.
What must it be like to spend hour after hour facing tired, disappointed, sometimes angry travelers while knowing that you did not create the problem and possess very little power to fix it?
I’m not sure I would have responded this way fifteen years earlier.
I suspect I would have spent more energy rehearsing my frustration, insisting internally that things should be different, as though my irritation might somehow bend reality back into alignment with my itinerary.
Age, spiritual practice, and perhaps a little hard-won humility have been teaching me another way.
Presence does not require pretending that everything is okay. Things were not okay. The airline was clearly struggling. People were missing important events. Workers appeared stretched painfully thin. Systems that normally remain invisible were suddenly exposed as fragile.
But compassion does not require denying any of that either.
Compassion asks something different: Who is here with me in this moment? What are they carrying? And what small act of care is actually available to me?
The airline chaos that summer became a news story, part of the larger disruption of travel and work emerging from the pandemic. The so-called “Great Resignation” suddenly felt less like an economic phrase and more like something I could see around me. An entire system appeared to be trying to function without enough people to sustain it.
It left me wondering how many other systems in our common life are doing the same thing.
How many hospitals, schools, restaurants, congregations, nonprofits, airports, social-service agencies, and workplaces appear to be functioning while the people holding them together are exhausted? How many systems are not exactly working so much as limping forward through the extraordinary effort of people we barely notice?
Perhaps a cancelled flight can become a small spiritual practice.
Not because inconvenience is secretly a gift. Not because suffering should be romanticized. And certainly not because broken systems should be excused.
But because moments when our plans fall apart can reveal something about the people we are becoming.
Standing in that line in Frankfurt, I was reminded that I cannot control very much.
I can notice.
I can make room.
I can hold someone’s place.
I can bring water.
I can wonder about the person behind the counter.
I can bless the stranger beside me.
And sometimes, in an airport terminal thousands of miles from home, that may be enough to remind us that we are not traveling alone.
Blessings to everyone whose flight was cancelled or delayed that summer. Blessings especially to the workers who kept showing up inside systems stretched beyond their capacity.
May we be gentle with one another when the itinerary falls apart.
Peace, dwight
