Seizing joy at the airport: An invaluable lesson from my 11-year-old
When the student is ready the teacher will appear, or so goes the proverb. The teacher appeared for me earlier this year in, of all places, Charlotte Douglas International Airport, in the person of my 11-year-old son, Jack.
It happened on a trip to the Florida Keys that I took with the boy. It was spring break, and I was excited to get there, where I reasoned my happiness would begin. My spirited son, stuck in the same TSA traffic as his old man, saw no reason in waiting.
“I’m going to make a friend,” he declared as we shuffled our feet through the slowly moving line.
It was early, my coffee hadn’t kicked in, and Jack is what football coaches across America call a “high-motor guy.” For all these reasons, I had barely processed what my son had said when he turned to the stout gentleman, about 50 years old, in line behind us. “Hello, stranger,” Jack began. “Where are you headed?”
I cannot say why my boy adopted the familiar tone of a 19th century Tombstone, Ariz. barkeep in his questioning, but it worked. The man said he was flying to Dallas to visit his cousin and seemed grateful, if a bit surprised, that Jack had started a conversation. We each headed to our gates.
Around mid-flight, the brief exchange between the stout Texas-bound traveler and the diminutive North Carolinian got me thinking about happiness. Like anyone else, I want more of it, but in this instance — and too often — mine depended on having something more. Here that something more was an experience: I wanted to be on the beach, toes in the ocean, then I would be begin to be happy. My contentment was not only deferred but discounted, since getting there was the present cost associated with future joy.
In contrast, Jack’s joy was both immediate and unmitigated. His happiness depended not on having more, but wanting less. In my son’s mind, the crowded flight wasn’t the price of our South Florida adventure, it was the beginning of the adventure itself. Since getting there and being there were inseparable to him, Jack was happy sooner and more completely, all from a choice entirely within his control.
Perhaps only a child can be quixotic enough to find joy in the monotony of air travel, but I’m not so sure. In his great work “Orthodoxy,” G.K. Chesterton observed the following on the nature of those who can find mirth in the mundane: “It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.”
A cynic, as Oscar Wilde famously penned, is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. A youthful mind is an uncynical mind that instinctively knows how to want less when it cannot have more. It never sees price, only value. How sad we lose that innocence; how fortunate we can reclaim it.
That’s what my little man reminded me in the TSA line, something important I’d forgotten. More joy is within grasp when we make ourselves young again, if only in mind.
This story was originally published May 31, 2022 at 1:05 PM.