Because Human Beings Are Not Ideas

<Another sigh.>

We're back from our trip--which was lovely, thank you.

But the journey home was delayed.  And delayed.  And then they had to change the airplane tire, thus delayed again.

And it was sometime after I had boarded the last airplane, settled the toddler next to me, and wanted to weep that I thought about the speed and convenience of our technology.  And I wished for a moment that I could travel as quickly and smoothly as sounds or images can across fiber optics and wireless networks.

But I remembered--gladly, even as I wanted to weep--that I am human.  And human beings are not ideas.  Human beings are not bits of information that can be compressed and communicated through wires or webs.  Human beings are bodies.  Human beings occupy space--even when airlines compress the space to what seems to be smaller than imaginable, we humans still live and move in time and place.

Part of the frustration of being human is the inability to be in more than one place at a time, but this is also one of the great gifts of being human.  I am here.  I have been there.  Someday, God willing, I will go to other places.

In the meantime, I hope to remember that here is a good place to be.  It is human to be someplace--even a crowded airplane late at night next to a cranky toddler.  I cannot be compressed.  Despite how thinly I spread myself, I cannot be distributed across a network.  My body ultimately needs food, water, rest, time, and space.  I am not an idea.  I am not an abstraction.

I am human, and that is good. 

And all of the people encroaching on my space in a crowded airplane?  They're human, too.  We're all in this together.

It was good to go away.

It's good to be home.