People travel for various reasons. Adventure. Fun. Business. Family affairs. I do travel for all these purposes. But I also travel to be alone. I feel this most in an airport and aboard a full-to-capacity plane. Alone. With no thought or concern except to get to my destination. It affords me an in-between. A shifting of gears. Transitioning from one grind to another.

There is something I like about not having to talk to anyone or not engaging with anyone even as I am in a crowded airport terminal or sitting in tight proximity to the next person in economy class. One doesn’t make eye contact or feel the need to say a word in greeting or acknowledgment of the other’s presence. Just a quiet acceptance that the journey is shared for the moment, with nothing beyond that.

While I always have a book in my travel bag, I now prefer sleeping or staring into the blue beyond or cottony clouds or being online while not in flight. Many of the other travelers do the same. Especially being online. Like screen-transfixed zombies. We travel the virtual world even as we travel the physical world, unaware of each other. Unless somebody takes or makes a call and holds a private conversation right next to your ear. Part of a kind of “community” behavior peculiar to Filipinos. Well, to Hong Kong taxi drivers, too, who chat endlessly on their phones on speaker even when they have passengers. Something you do not experience in Japan, where many people die silent, lonely deaths, unknown to anyone else.

It’s said that the motor vehicle has led to greater social isolation even as it has allowed us to travel to more places and farther destinations. We encase ourselves in steel or some composite material and tint our windows, making us invisible to occupants of other vehicles speeding right next to us. The same happens even when we are in a tightly-packed airplane. We become blind to others and sink into ourselves, very conscious not to encroach on the already constricted personal space of the other person. Which works fine for me. I could be sitting next to God or Death and I would not know. Or care. 

We often travel to experience the new. But it is the travel to what is familiar that seems to have more meaning and more lasting impressions. The echoes are more audible, the memories more meaningful. Or not. Because so much time has passed. Because so much has happened. Or not happened. In which case the disconnection is more felt. And you wonder why you bothered.

Or you come away with mixed feelings. Disconnection and reconnection fighting for a place in your heart. Like visiting a now-subdivided ancestral farm acquired by my grandparents almost a century ago that one wants to keep for sentimental reasons but one knows will require more effort and time and money to become truly productive. Thus, while one can capture bucolic scenes on camera, they are deceptive and will never show unresolved issues of conflicting land claims and use, or even downright neglect. That observation about us being mere stewards of the earth is painfully true. We will never truly own this earth. We can only take care of it, or destroy it. We need not look to outer space for aliens. We are the aliens to this earth. And that is the ultimate disconnection.

The farm is in Talakag town in Bukidnon, of late a hotbed for the insurgency, and close to where an FA-50 fighter jet of the Air Force went down just a few days ago. That a fighter jet is used in support of ground troops in the middle of the night in mountainous terrain is a questionable tactic. Unless it was psyops and they were buzzing the insurgent enemy. Flying low and robbing the guerillas of sleep. Well, one should never do that in Bukidnon, the province of cloud-covered mountains. Even a civilian airliner is ill-advised to go low in the area, as unfortunately happened to the Cebu Pacific Flight 387 that went down in Mount Sumagaya in Claveria, a highland town of Misamis Oriental adjoining Bukidnon, as it attempted an unusual approach to the old Lumbia airport, now an Edca site. The best approach to Lumbia is over the sea, not over the mountains. By mid-afternoon it is rainy and clouds wreathe the mountains. Risky enough for civil aviation, how much more for a military fighter jet, going at high speed, at night; anything can happen to a low-flying aircraft.

Still, there is the bounty of good food, nice places, and good company to enjoy wherever we travel. One still needs attachments, after all, no matter how fleeting.

Read more: Finding the quiet