Travel

Mornings in New York

Tuesday, August 12, 2025 • 7 min read

We emerge from the air-conditioned lobby of our apartment building on this warm August morning, pulled along by two anxious dogs. The humidity slips over and around us like a sweaty embrace. The faint scent of garbage, flowering shrubs, and dog urine hangs in the still air.

We look both ways for other dogs before descending the steps, alert to the bedlam an encounter here at the edge of their estate would create. To the east, Madison Avenue, and, a few blocks further, the subway station at Lexington that will take us almost anywhere we want to go. To the west, Fifth Avenue and Central Park.

This is one of New York’s most affluent neighborhoods, where a basic apartment on this street fetches $4 million. We could never afford to live here, but we can scrape together the rent for a season.

We walk toward the park along the quiet street of brownstones and high-rise apartments. We arrived too late to catch the spring blossoms of the Callery pear trees that line the street, but we are thankful for their shade and greenery. Uniformed doormen wave as we pass. We slip across the street to avoid a lady with two high-strung Poodles.

As we wait for the light on Fifth Avenue, we take in the scene: the taxi cabs, the food delivery bicyclists, the moving trucks, the runners, the tourists, the city buses filled with office workers heading downtown, the old, the young, the black, the white, the men and women clad in business attire talking on headphones, gesturing as they fill their walk with calls to the office, the poor, the edgy, the mothers pushing strollers.

Where we’re standing, a well-known actress recently stooped to pet one of our dogs, her million-dollar face dangerously close to Preston, our unpredictable rescue. Another time, we turned away as a homeless woman defecated on the sidewalk just across from us.

Along the stone wall of the park entrance, two older men sit at opposite ends of a bench, turned toward each other in banter, probably dear friends exchanging insults.

Santayana once said: “There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.” This endless variety must be making us very wise indeed. We’ll see more diversity and strangeness in the span of a single traffic light than in an entire month back home.

We cross and turn into Central Park. Dogs are everywhere, many running off leash, but there is no trouble. The rules are different here. There is a secret dog code that makes this a safe zone, a sanctuary. Ours become angels, unrecognizable with their toothy smiles and chill behavior, no matter what other dog swings into their vision.

We say hello to a few people we see most mornings. Franklin smells the air in search of a lady who carries special treats in her purse, waiting just for him, it seems. When he finally spots her, there is no stopping his enthusiastic pull to her side.

We steer for a grassy meadow where the dogs relieve themselves. A million and a half dogs visit the park every year, though I rarely see abandoned dog waste. This surprised me at first because there aren’t that many trash cans in the park, and I’ve yet to find a single dog poop bag station. It’s nice to see how much New Yorkers care about the park, fondly known as their 843-acre backyard.

We take a slow ambling loop through the winding paths to enjoy the tranquility of this massive oasis walled in by concrete and buildings. The wildlife is plentiful and tame — squirrels approach, unfazed by humans or dogs; pigeons flap and hop on the paths so close you worry about stepping on them. The dogs were shocked at first when these birds failed to run away at their approach. Now, they accept this as normal. Live and let live might as well be the motto for all of this city.

As we near the park exit, we say hello to another regular couple with two older fluffy white dogs. The woman, perhaps seventy, pushes the dogs in a baby carriage while they look on like royals. Her husband trails behind with a picker-upper stick and a garbage bag. He fills a bag of trash every morning. He never smiles at our greeting. He is perennially grumpy, yet his pride in the park is evident and heartwarming.

I am still getting used to the outward gruffness of these everyday encounters. A New Yorker won’t meet your eye on the street, but they will sneak a grin at your dog. Each walks in a practiced bubble of indifference, yet ask for directions or help, and the barrier instantly dissolves. Beneath the gruff, New Yorkers are some of the friendliest people in the world.

Franklin slows his pace as we retrace our steps to the apartment and stops about twenty yards from the entrance. He loves these morning walks and would prefer to carry on, perhaps a leisurely saunter uptown, or a quick dart beneath the turnstiles to catch a downtown train. I keep a tight grip on this wanderer’s leash.

As I wait out his stubbornness, I think about why we decided to drive across country and rent an apartment in New York City for five months … in the summer.

A couple of reasons seem almost practical: for one, we wanted to escape the hottest months in Arizona. We figured the humidity in New York would be easier to tolerate than 110-degree afternoons (this, we’re discovering, is debatable). And, I lived for a short time in New York in the 1990s. Lisa and I began our courtship here. It’s a common ailment in later life to revisit those places of our youth, to peel back the years looking for the unscathed, happy-go-lucky version of ourselves.

But the truth is, we came here to shake up a pair of retired lives that had gotten too settled, too predictable, too easy. Our perspectives on the state of the world and our ambitions for the future had become narrow-minded and meager. We didn’t need more and more of the same. We required the shock treatment of an entirely new way of life … and a new way of thinking.

Thoreau went to Walden Pond, turning away from society to find his truth in the wilderness. Twenty-three years on a rural island in Washington state taught me the spiritual value of nature and seclusion. I have never been more at peace than while walking the quiet trails of an island forest or losing myself in the cosmos on a clear night from the cockpit of a sailboat. And the last three years I’ve spent in the Arizona desert, removed from all familiarity, felt like a blanching of my spirit, a stripping down of my very identity, as I suffered through a time of intense grief.

But in the back of my mind, New York beckoned with its gritty flood of humanity electrified by creativity and moxie and unlimited possibility. A city that celebrates audacity and the human compulsion to stretch far beyond themselves, scrabbling ever upwards, hammering a dent in the universe before falling back to earth. New York City is the tale of Icarus on a repeating loop.

If there was ever a place to dream up new beginnings, this is it. Lisa, who has mostly recovered from her health scare when we first arrived, paints landscapes in Central Park and studies art at the Met. I write and nibble at the edges of the sprawling literary life of the city: the author talks, the bookstores, the incredible libraries and reading rooms. Together, we have explored almost every part of New York, the sketchy and the sublime, mastering subways and buses like locals. There’s a pang as we imagine the life we might have in some of the neighborhoods we visit: the rows of tree-lined brownstones in Brooklyn, the fabled streets of the West Village.

I’ll admit to scribbling rough calculations in the margins of my journal to figure out if we could move here. Between the real estate costs, the taxes, and, well, the cost of everything else, it doesn’t pencil, not by a long shot. Still, there’s a part of me, the irrational part, that says screw it. No one comes here because it makes sense. Dreams rarely make sense.

We finally coax the dogs up the building steps. This first walk of the day is done. Now coffee, breakfast over the folds of the New York Times, and then? We’ll be back on these streets with a bounce in our steps toward the next discovery, our eyes bright with the promise of an unfolding story.

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Where We Were Meant to Be

Friday, May 30, 2025 • 7 min read

We are walking through Central Park on a beautiful May morning, two lovebirds, married these many years. It’s our third day in Manhattan, and it feels as though the city has opened its arms wide and hugged us. Everywhere we look is green and lush. We pass a bakery nestled deep inside the park and decide to return tomorrow for a coffee and treats.

We emerge from the meadows and winding paths to the thrum and bustle of the Upper West Side. We walk up Broadway looking for a stationery store that sells my kind of notebooks and the art supplies she needs for an upcoming drawing class. The store is nearby, and I’m scanning both the businesses along the street and the map on my phone.

Without warning, Lisa stops. She points to a store sign and speaks a series of numbers. A SEPHORA sign comes out as 8-4-3-5. The neon TD Bank sign is another string of numbers. I look at her closely to see if she’s joking. She’s not.

My heart begins to thump in my chest. We find a bench on a traffic island in the middle of Broadway. I ask her to read an advertisement on the bus, and she rattles off more numbers. Her tone becomes emphatic, as if it’s me who’s confused. I ask her to tell me her name. She doesn’t know it.

I wrap my arms around her and tell her to take deep breaths. In a few minutes, we hear the siren of a distant ambulance. “That’s for us,” I say. There are people everywhere, but I feel utterly alone. My mind goes quiet. I know what this is.

Twenty days earlier, during a quiet morning at home in Phoenix, Lisa discovers she can no longer read the text on her phone. Moments later, she can’t recall my name or our daughter’s name. We drive to the emergency room, and she is whisked into a triage room where doctors assess her. They say it’s a stroke and administer a powerful blood thinner. In two hours, her memory comes back. CT Scans, MRI Scans, blood tests, and physical evaluations follow. The doctors say we were lucky to have come to the hospital so quickly. The scans reveal no permanent damage. After three days in the hospital, I bring her home, counting blessings.

This is good because in a week, we will drive to New York with a carload of stuff and two dogs to start a big adventure: five months of city life in a furnished Manhattan apartment. We talk about canceling the trip. The odds of a second stroke are high in the first weeks. What if this happens again in New Mexico? Or along the highway in some desolate part of Missouri? She won’t hear of it. She feels fine, and we decide to go, but I am nervous.

We follow a northeastern course of freeways over six long days, stopping only for fast food and pet-friendly hotels. Our route changes daily as we dodge weather systems that, a week later, will turn deadly for these midwestern states.

We finally creep through the Lincoln Tunnel and emerge into the chaos of NYC traffic. We feel relieved and lucky to have arrived in one piece, safe and sound, in our Upper East Side apartment.

I move through the following days in a panicked blur. The ambulance ride, the stroke team at Mount Sinai, the urgent questions about medications, allergies, and medical history. The doctors believe it’s a seizure, not a stroke. She has no physical stroke symptoms, and she is healthy. And having such a drastic memory lapse twice in three weeks almost surely rules out a stroke. Yet there is no definitive proof. I begin to understand that modern medicine is still more art than science.

More tests and scans eventually lead to a conclusion. Lisa has a benign brain tumor, a meningioma, pressing on her brain’s language and memory center, which caused the seizures. We’ve known about this tumor for a year, and she had radiation therapy five months ago to treat it, which these doctors say was a grave mistake. An emergency surgery to remove the tumor is scheduled in two days.

I feel pressure in my chest as I work through what this means. We are thousands of miles from home in a new city without friends or family. Our two dogs are alone in the apartment, and I run back through the Park to walk and feed them, then run back to the hospital. Lisa’s amnesia lingers, and I cannot be away from her side for long. When I return, she is confused and crying.

Our daughter, Mallory, flies in from California. I start to get a hold of myself. I make a rough plan to get us back to Arizona, where we have friends and insurance, and Lisa can more easily recover from surgery. We tag-team hospital visits and dog walking.

We meet Lisa’s doctor, one of the country’s best neurosurgeons, who happens to work out of the very hospital the ambulance driver chose out of a half dozen possibilities. The doctor explains that surgery is necessary to prevent her from having more seizures. There are risks, but these are manageable. This cannot wait. He can do it. He will do it. Now.

I sit with Lisa on the morning of the surgery. She is quiet. She knows she might not wake up from this. My vision narrows as I watch a nurse wheel her away to the operating room. I walk slowly back to the apartment to wait.

The surgery is a success. The surgeon removes the tumor without damaging an encroaching blood vessel or causing a seizure. She wakes up in pain, but herself. She loses the ability to read again, which scares her, but she remembers our names. I sit at the foot of her bed in the ICU wing while doctors and nurses poke and prod her. Her head is wrapped in bandages and gauze. The pain is intense, but they can give her nothing but Tylenol. I send Mallory back to the apartment. She shouldn’t see her mom like this. Six hours later, I walk home in darkness and pouring rain.

The next morning, I join the queue of people at the hospital’s entrance as visiting hours begin — the line snakes around the cavernous lobby. The woman ahead of me asks who I am visiting. I tell her in broad strokes what happened.

“Oh my gosh, I have chills” she says. “Imagine if she had the seizure on your road trip? Or if you had been walking in a different part of the city? To wind up here of all places? You have a guardian angel, my friend,” she says.

When I enter Lisa’s room, I see the spark has returned to her eyes. The pain has subsided. She feels better. She shows me how she can read some of the medical notices on the wall. She asks for coffee.

As I enter the bakery across the street from the hospital, the smell of freshly brewed coffee and pastries rouses me. The light of the world grows a little brighter. She’s going to be all right. She is going to be all right. My throat closes up. I study the menu for a long time before I place my order.

Lisa had her surgery six days ago. She was discharged from the hospital the next day. Her memory is intact. She can read. Each day, she is a little stronger, though the recovery from the operation will take weeks or maybe months. We both feel blessed to have come through this, here in the city of new beginnings.

The post Where We Were Meant to Be appeared first on Robert Breen.

Not Exactly Traveling Light

Saturday, May 10, 2025 • 2 min read

We arrive in New York City in less than a week for our five-month adventure. Normally, we would fly from Phoenix, but because of the dogs, we must make the cross-country drive.

The idea behind this trip has been percolating for decades. When I retired, I wanted to travel and see the world, but not in a conventional way. I didn’t want to see ten countries in two weeks. That’s an exhausting vacation, not travel, and definitely not a pilgrimage. No. I wanted to immerse myself in a place as a local. Rent a furnished flat in Madrid for three months with just a Kindle, a traveler’s notebook, and a good pair of walking shoes.

The problem started with the Ford Expedition I rented for the drive. I chose a large vehicle because I wanted room for the dogs and anything we might bring. But now, as I survey the suitcases and eight loaded boxes of clothing and gear, I know I have forgotten my ideal of traveling light.

The boxes include a blender, two gaming consoles, a box of dog food, treats and toys, thirteen pairs of shoes, a super automatic coffee machine, a fancy electronic scale, fifty pounds of dumbbells, heavy coats, makeup, blankets, vitamins, rain shells, and a box of just computer gear.

Yet, I can’t name a single thing we should remove.

There’s a psychological term for this. Stuff expands to the space allowed.

Next time, I’ll rent a Ford Fiesta.

P.S. – Follow my micro blog for more frequent updates on our adventures!

The post Not Exactly Traveling Light appeared first on Robert Breen.

These Vagabond Shoes

Wednesday, April 2, 2025 • 5 min read

We are sitting on a bench in Madison Square Park in the Flatiron District. Buildings encircle this urban oasis, framed by a blue New York sky. It is our last day in the city, and we have been walking all morning. Small dogs in fancy coats trot by us with their owners. The din of the city is somehow a comfort, like ocean surf. The temperature hovers around 30 degrees Fahrenheit, yet I feel warm in the sunlight, layered as I am in cold weather gear. Lisa sits beside me, taking it all in.

“Would you ever think of moving here permanently?” I ask. It’s a common question we pose when we travel.

“Oh, yeah,” she says without any hesitation. “I’ve always been a city girl.” Her face glows in the chilly air.

When we retired four years ago in our mid-50s, it seemed as if we had life by the tail. We sold the house and moved aboard our 43’ ocean-going trawler, set on exploring the world at a sedate six miles an hour. I’ve always loved the water, and getting this chance to cast off the bowlines was a lifelong dream. We built a home in Arizona in a 55+ retirement community as a mere precaution, a refuge from the soggy Pacific Northwest winters. Snowbirds, or maybe seagulls, might have better described us.

But a family tragedy dashed those plans. Crushed and grief-stricken, we sold the boat and stayed put in Arizona these past three years. We made friends and enjoyed the newness and comforts of a planned community that sprouted from nothing in the desert. Mostly, we worked on finding meaning in an unthinkable loss.

Over the past few months, Lisa and I started brainstorming ideas to escape the heat of these brutal Arizona summers. As someone who spent his entire life a half mile from the beach, I had no idea how scorching the desert during the height of summer could be.

These talks felt like a good sign. We were coming through it, maybe even out of it. Like Odysseus, we have traveled far. We have suffered. We have buried an oar in this place so far from the sea.

As we vetted possibilities, we knew we wanted challenge and variety, not vacation-style leisure. We needed a break from this predictable, curated life that attracts many to retirement communities.

But neither of us wanted the usual travel of flights and hotels and always being on the go. We could live out of a suitcase for a few weeks, but all summer? No. We did that during a family vacation to Europe. Forty-three stops in sixty days, including an attempt to see Paris in a weekend. Ugh. Never again.

As we pored over maps and searched travel sites, New York City kept popping up. I lived there for a year in the 1990s when Lisa and I first started dating. Neither of us could think of another U.S. city that had as much to offer a pair of healthy retirees with ample time on their hands. It would also mean a return to our very beginnings.

So, during an unseasonably warm Arizona January, we dug through our closets for winter clothes and flew to Manhattan. We walked all over the city, through Chelsea, Greenwich Village, Midtown, the Upper West and Upper East Sides, and Harlem. I heard stories that New York had changed for the worse, but in my eyes, the city was even more beautiful and clean than when I left it in 1995.

By the end of the week, we knew we had found our summer destination. We rented a furnished apartment on the Upper East Side from mid-May through mid-October. The brownstone is a half block from Central Park and not far from the five-story walk-up I rented many years ago.

We’ll have all the time we need to explore the city at our leisure, not as tourists, but as starry-eyed transplants. I’ll take writing classes. Lisa will paint. We’ll join a gym. We’ll walk the dogs twice a day through Central Park. I’ll make friends with the docents at the Met, a place I stumbled through in a daze during my only visit, but now I can study methodically.

Figuring out how to live in New York City — where to shop for groceries and how to get around on the subways — is the type of travel that, in time, will change us forever. Paris, to me now, is an irritating blur. After five months of daily life, New York will be woven into our DNA. We will always have it.

Yes, it’s a costly trip. New York is one of the most expensive cities in the world, and we splurged on a deluxe apartment. We wanted the best possible experience for this new mode of immersive travel, which might be something we repeat each summer.

“I can’t believe we rented an apartment,” Lisa says, touching my gloved hand.

“We’re doing this,” I agree.

What is this stirring I feel in my chest? Is it hope? This must be what sunrise feels to the hiker lost deep in the woods. We resume our walk, looking around as if we own the place.

The Wastelands

Saturday, September 2, 2023 • 5 min read

Grieving the loss of a child is a journey through wastelands you never expected to cross. Unlike every other challenge you’ve ever faced, there is no easy way through a loss like this. You stumble and fall. You curse. You are hobbled and bloody. You are not sure of the way. You might be going in circles.

The truth is everyone suffers in this life. It’s our lot to take the awful with the beautiful. We all must face it. In a perfect world, your mom wouldn’t forget you in the fog of Alzheimer’s Disease. You wouldn’t lose a dear friend to cancer in the prime of her life. Your son wouldn’t die in a motorcycle accident before his twenty-first birthday.

In the months before we lost Connor, we crossed a high wire of reinvention. We retired from our careers. We sold our long-time family home and said goodbye to a lifetime of friends on Vashon Island. We bought a winter home in Arizona with the half-sane plan of living a life split between the summer sea and the winter desert. For half the year, home was where we'd drop the anchor.

Reinvention might come easier for some. I felt like a reluctant hermit crab who knows he must shift to a new shell to survive but dreads the transfer. The plans were years in the making. And just at that vulnerable juncture between one shell and the other, that final letting go of the safety and security of the familiar for the heady promise of a new life, a tsunami upends everything, stranding this naked, scared crab, its tiny claws raised as if to fight the wind and water and waves.

And yet, life continues. We settled into the new house in Arizona. Little bursts of joy came from unexpected sources: the convenience of curbside trash and recycling, reliable high-speed internet, and kind, welcoming neighbors. I unpacked the sixty boxes of books that make up my library, caressing each volume, inhaling its scent, remembering its message as I slowly rebuilt my sanctuary, my illusive shell.

Reading has always been a solace. I read a lot of history and philosophy these past months: the marvels of early Egypt and the brutality of Ancient Rome in Will Durant’s grand opus, The Story of Civilization; the millions of years of Earth’s geology poetically taught in Basin and Range by John McPhee; and the insignificance of our human existence in a careening, infinite universe in Probable Impossibilities by Alan Lightman. Taking a dispassionate view can ease the sting of personal loss.

We sold MV Indiscretion this spring, saying goodbye to trawler life and our ties to the Pacific Northwest. I have let go of so many layers of my identity — business professional, islander, sailor, son to my parents, and now father to my son — that it felt right to reach back to utter beginnings, where I might remake myself, like Gandalf after his plunge from the Bridge of Moria.

We bought a small off-road capable RV in April and have taken a few trips to explore the deserts and mountains of the Southwest. In June, we crossed into Mexico to camp on the shores of the Sea of Cortez. These months in the desert were the longest I’ve strayed from the ocean in my entire life. I missed the smell of the sea and the feel of dried salt on my skin. We waded in the warm surf, feeling once again that indescribable joy of shifting sand under our heels and between our toes while flocks of pelicans dove for their dinner a few yards from us.

I sat beside tide pools nestled within the rocky outcrops that lay between long stretches of sand: hermit crabs battling to defend their territories, starfish, sea stars, sea slugs, mussels, sea urchins, and tiny brine shrimp, all pursuing the minutiae of their daily lives. Looking up into the cosmos and down into a tide pool, I noted the parallels: we are all one.

A strong south wind picked up one night, and gusts gently rocked the RV on its suspension. I emerged from a heavy sleep to check the anchor, trying to remember how far we were from the rocks on shore. I drifted back to sleep, still dreaming we were afloat. I know the sea beckons on the far side of this wilderness.

After a long period of intentional isolation, I have begun the process of reconnecting with old friends and making new friends here in Arizona. This has been difficult for me. They ask me how I’m doing. Am I OK? I don’t have an answer. “What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step,” said Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Every day, I take a step.

I’m writing this tonight from a small campground in southern Colorado. We’ve been traveling for a few weeks, taking the backroads, stopping often, seeing where the open road takes us. We have no plan, no definite time to return. It feels good to roam.

Driving through western New Mexico, I felt a lightness I didn’t expect. The beauty of the colorful mesas and buttes rising around us filled me with awe. We hiked to La Ventana Natural Arch to find ourselves in an ancient, sacred place — a place of prayer and hope and resilience. It left me wanting to see more, to do more. For the first time in many months, my mind tilted forward, a blessed release from so much focus on the past.

Every day brings a little more joy and a little less sadness. On good days, I see a brightening just over the horizon. A clearing? Yet there are still those days when I sink deep into sorrow and recognize the false dawn. There is no way around this, only forward, across this barren terrain. One step. Then another. When I dare look around, I see so many others walking beside me. Grief is the price we all pay for love. Won’t you take my hand? It won’t be long now. If death has taught me anything, it's that nothing persists, not even grief.

Fear of Flying

Monday, January 28, 2019 • 7 min read

I spent last weekend in Las Vegas to attend my niece’s Little White Chapel wedding on the Strip. Frequent flier miles paid for our tickets, placing us in the far back of the plane. On the way home to Seattle, my family took the whole row on the port side of the aircraft, while I settled into the opposite aisle seat. A couple soon appeared and clambered into the seats next to mine. They had flown down for the weekend to see Billy Idol perform and were on their way back home.

I felt my seat grow a little smaller as I wedged my body and gear inside the proper confines of my aisle seat. I’ve flown in a lot of middle seats in my life. Those armrests go with the seat-bearer. Trust me on that.

The woman, dressed in sensible travel clothes, sat in the window seat and soon busied herself with a book. Her companion, fitted out in trim, athletic apparel, was personable enough upon introduction, but soon fell silent, back straight, eyes open and staring forward. Unmoving.

Before every plane trip, I make sure I bring along enough distractions to keep me occupied for the duration of the nerve-rattling tin can captivity of air travel. While I’ve flown nearly a million miles over my life, most of it shuttling between airports and corporate conference rooms, I still maintain an unshakable dread of flying. I’ve woken from nightmares of being stuck in the middle seat of a plane with nothing to read. Seriously. 

In the old days, to take my mind off the jolts of turbulence, I weighted down my bag with two or three books and a couple newspapers, along with an ample supply of work projects. For this particular trip, I brought my Kindle with a newly begun 1,000-page novel, an iPad loaded with the day’s Wall Street Journal, a movie and a few episodes of a TV show I’m following, and an iPhone with 300 hours of music and a slew of games. Pair all this with noise-canceling headphones, and I carried more entertainment gear than the tiny seat back pocket could accommodate — my electronically-insulated cocoon.

While the man beside me continued his meditative trance, bugging the shit out of me, I considered my obsession with keeping busy on planes. I try to meditate every day, but I cannot imagine a two and a half hour meditation while hurtling along at 34,000 feet in intermittent turbulence. Taking a car ferry every day like I do is far more dangerous than flying, based on the data. Yet I need something at hand to occupy my mind in any confined space, especially a multi-hour strapped-in plane ride.

I thought this fellow, in his enthusiasm for seeing Billy Idol, must have forgotten to bring along reading material. You know, rushing out the door with your bags and tickets, excited for the bright lights of Vegas and to see a beloved entertainer. This can be forgiven. I think. But wait. The Airline Magazine was resting at eye level in the seat-back 11 inches from his direct line of sight. Did he ever flip through it, even as a diversion? No, he did not.

My air travel anxiety began even before I made that walk down the gangway to board my first flight. When I was seven, my mom shared a story with me about a strange feeling she had at the gate before boarding a plane to Guam when she was in her early twenties. At the last minute, she followed her instincts and decided not to board. The plane crashed with all passengers lost somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. A horrifying event. Looking back now, I don’t think this actually happened to my mom. I think she made the whole thing up after reading about something similar in the National Enquirer or watching a TV show on ESP. I can’t ask her now, but even if it wasn’t true, it instilled a healthy fear of flying in me at an impressionable age.

Then, in my teens during my short-lived boxing career, Chuck Robinson, a 17-year-old welterweight, two years my senior, made it on the Muhammad Ali Boxing Team all the way from our little small-town Washington state boxing program. He got to spar with the great one himself at Ali’s gym in Santa Monica. Chuck was an exceptional athlete, and to me and many others, a real local hero. He and 13 other amateur boxers flew to Europe in the Spring of 1980 to compete in the qualifiers for the 1980 Olympics - a dream of mine and near reality for Chuck. Somewhere over Warsaw, the aircraft suffered a catastrophic mechanical failure and spiraled out of control for 26 seconds before crashing. The muscles and tendons between wrist and forearm of most of the athletes were severed on impact, suggesting these young men were awake and gripping their seats at the time of the crash. The plane disintegrated as it plowed into the ground, killing all 87 aboard.

Wreckage of LOT Polish Airlines Flight 7

I think about Chuck and that awful half-minute of terror every time I fly.

As I considered my seatmate, I realize the two of us must exist on separate ends of a personality spectrum. Me, with with my gadgets sprawled on my lap as we taxied down the runway, intent on distracting myself from the potential of immediate demise; he, with his zen-like serenity, oblivious to the unnatural motion and angle as we made our ascent to the heavens, only to plummet to our deaths should one of a hundred possible mechanical failures present itself.

When the drink cart rolled through after a rough bit of turbulence, I ordered a beer, maybe my last, I reasoned. He took only water.

Near the end of the flight, I stole a glance his way, sure to find him asleep, perhaps a spot of drool pooled on his fitted microfiber shirt. But no, I saw his eyes were open and intently focused .... on nothing. I turned away, abashed. A part of me wanted to be like him, to be relaxed and calm, to be present, even during this suspended limbo of plane travel, maybe crafting a beautiful sonnet or the perfect line of code as he stared at the seat back ahead of him. Yet, at that moment I found myself hating him. His smugness and self-assuredness. His straight spine and posture. His stillness.

After the plane landed safely and people began the slow disembarkment ahead of us, we exchanged pleasantries. Welcome home, I said. You too, he said. That must have been some show, I said. He and his companion smiled and nodded. I helped take down their bags from the overhead compartment.

While we waited our turn to leave the plane, I wondered again at my nervousness of air travel. Do I need all these distractions underway, or am I obscuring an opportunity at more profound personal enlightenment to fully experience the present moment and embrace the wonderful but temporary life we have been given? Maybe this man has the right of it.

I looked around and found entire rows of people with their heads pointed down, intent on their tiny screens, catching up on what they had missed in our three-hour sojourn from tarmac to tarmac. The siren song of voicemail and text message pings filled the stale air of the plane all around me like the sounds of a pinball machine. I was not alone in this constant need for distraction.

As I followed my seatmate and his companion up the aisle, I vowed to myself: next time, I will face down my demons and experience the joy and terror of the moment even as we careen and jostle through the skies above.

Writing this from the Alaska Airlines Boardroom as I await my flight to San Francisco, I have already broken that promise. I would save a child from a burning building, but I won’t board a plane without a well-stocked iPad.

In my acceptance of these shortcomings, I tip my hat to the well-found soul in seat 34B.