This was written aboard Continental Airlines flight 29 from London to Newark on April 23, 2010.
I flew to London on Monday April 12 to speak at the International CounterTerrorism Conference. When the conference ended on Thursday, rumors began circulating that flights were canceled. Within hours all air traffic in the UK had shut down. By Sunday it still did not look good. No one had any idea when this would end. A friend offered me a place to stay. So I left the hotel and London, took a 3 hour train ride, and arrived at a country cottage. There I was to wait who-knew-how-long. Before leaving London I made yet another plane reservation for the following Friday. That was the last seat on a flight from London to NY that week.
Despite the graciousness of many people, I found it a horrifically trying ordeal that has caused me to rethink many aspects of my life. I have slept on many airport floors and had to spend extra nights in hotels many times. But this was different: being away from those I love with absolutely no idea when the separation would end.
Deeper issues get raised here beyond personal distress. We make our plans and decisions and act on them against a repressed background of processes that are entirely beyond our control. Our experience of our world as shaped by our agency and capacity to plan and predict (while we know at some level intellectually this is an illusion) is a small island of experience in a vast sea of uncontrolled and unpredictable forces. Brought up as I was, and as most are in western culture, to value agency, predictability, and control left me unprepared to deal such a radical experience of contingency and total uncertainty. This is not simply about finitude and ultimately death. They are facts of life about which no one can be completely ignorant who has read texts authored by Tibetan monks whose spiritual practice is to meditate at night in the grave yard. Or who lived thru 9/11 up-close. And in other ways too the contingencies of finitude and mortality are not strangers to me.
No, this experience of life totally upended by volcanic ash exposes another dimension of unpredictability and contingency: that the structures of plan and intention out of which, of necessity, we construct our lives in the modern world are profoundly fragile and precarious. Much too fragile and precarious for the weight that we ask them to bear.
There is yet another dimension here. As systems become more complex, they become more vulnerable. That is certainly true in the biological world where viruses and cockroaches, I am told, alone could survive a nuclear holocaust. Ironic in the extreme that I write these words at 35,000 feet in one of the most complex systems we know-a modern transatlantic jet-writing on a notebook computer-another incredibly complex system despite its tiny size. Yet the eruption of a volcano hundreds of miles away effectively rendered inoperable for days this amazing feat of intelligence and manufacturing. At the same time simpler, propeller driven aircraft were able to fly into the ash cloud unharmed in order to gain the data necessary to calculate that the larger, more intricate "jumbo jets" could fly. Or a month ago we had a storm come in from the sea, and not the largest of storms by far, but it blew out an electrical wire connected to our apartment building. For 3 days we had virtually no electricity, connection with the Internet, etc. All it took was a gust of wind and my computer was useless. But I could still write with a pen and a piece of paper. On another and more serious note, at the conference on terrorism that brought me to London I learned some of the ways that our daily lives now depend on indescribably complex systems on the Internet-the delivery of water and electricity, life and death medical treatment decisions, trains and subways and air traffic, the security of our savings and financial transactions (to name just a few). The Internet is no longer simply a conveyer of information but has become a critical infrastructure to our way of life. Here too increasing complexity equals increasing vulnerability.
And I realize this principle applies to me personally. I have made my life increasingly complex. I accept invitations to travel to Europe or around the United States as though I were simply driving to the next town. I agree to editorial projects that require coordinating large numbers of authors and texts. I serve on international committees that bring together scores of people from around the globe. I commit myself to keep track of responsibilities in several different professional domains. In my professional life I too have become so complex that I am too, too vulnerable.
Such a review of one's life in the face of extreme circumstances is a spiritual discipline with a long history in both the western and eastern traditions. The moral and spiritual (and professional) impact of this experience will take months, maybe years, to fully come to fruition. At this moment all I want to do is acknowledge that what I am doing here is not special or unique but part of a long tradition and lineage. Knowing that gives me a certain confidence that if I can manage to keep faith with this process that it will keep faith with me and produce some positive, if perhaps disruptive, results.
Continental Flight 29 from London lands safely at Newark Airport. As he finishes checking my passport, the officer says (as he always does) "Welcome home, sir." I have tears in my eyes.
