Transit

The word “transit” has a number of meanings, depending on its usage. As a noun, “transit” means “the carrying of people, goods, or materials from one place to another.” Colloquially, we understand it to mean “the conveyance of passengers on public transportation.”

I found the following definition most convincing: “an act of passing through or across a place.” We associate transit with transportation and movement.

Today, Chelsea and I are set to embark on a four month journey of transit–passing through or across the globe. We’re sitting in a New York City airport waiting for our flight across the Atlantic Ocean. From there, we’ll use planes, trains, automobiles, and our own legs to move across and back four continents. It’s pretty surreal that we have the ability to do this, and that the world is small enough, and connected enough, to make such a journey seamless.

I think this journey is more than a physical trip. I am looking forward to a spiritual and metaphysical transit–passing through time and space to connect with another soul. I am looking forward to the challenges of spending twenty four hours a day over the next one hundred and twenty days — collectively, two thousand two hundred and eighty hours (more, if they’re billable)– in an array of challenging environments. Foreign cultures, language barriers, human exhaustion, an infinite number of things that will not go according to our plans. All of these, an opportunity to connect, and transcend, the physical and connect on the spiritual plane.

Let’s board.