leaving on a jet plane

It never goes away, this wanderlust. Everytime i send someone off at the airport, that familiar yearning starts up again. It's never left.

So this time i was at Terminal 2 in Changi Airport, looking on at the people with their trolleys full of luggage, and there was this dark-haired man, with his typically public-school fringe flopping about his forehead, in a long dark brown winter coat with the belt hanging loosely about his hips, and suddenly i was back in England, huddled up in my coat, cold autumn wind blowing in my face, making my way up Broad Street in Oxford, heading for a weekend escapade with my JC friends; or perhaps i was in London, hurrying for an early-morning tutorial in the Foster Court buildings amidst the determined click-clacking of shoes that characterise the office crowd. And the departure information on the big screens offering tantalising glimpes of a different world elsewhere, away from here - LONDON, NEW YORK, HANOI, SHANGHAI, ATHENS, COLOMBO, CAPE TOWN, OSAKA, BRISBANE...

i don't know how some people can be content to just stay here on this little handkerchief of land and not want to go away and see what the rest of the world is like. Perhaps this is another failure of imagination and empathy on my part, but i cannot understand why anyone would choose the boredom of staying in a place so familiar all their lives when they could be out there, somewhere else, discovering a different life with different people in a different place.

And honestly, i'm not sure if i ever want this feeling to go away. It's human nature to want things, and if that wanting is a given, then let me want the uncommon rather than the everyday, the different rather than the familiar.

No wonder Tennyson's 'Ulysses' made such an impact when i first read it in university:


I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breath were life. Life piled on life
Were all to little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

(from 'Ulysses', Alfred Lord Tennyson)
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