Brussels to Doha

On airplanes, while many watch movies and television on their personalized screens, I almost always resort to the interactive map. I probably spend hours staring at it, watching it change viewpoints and the plane itself weave in and out of its predetermined course. You can see the sun -- where in the world it is light and where dark -- and other places you have been sometime before. The obsession with maps goes back a long ways.

The interactive map was especially interesting on my flight from Brussels to Doha. From Istanbul we seemingly went out of our way to avoid Syrian airspace, which put us right over Baghdad, Iran looming off to the left. Then it was Kuwait, the beaches of the Persian Gulf, and finally the peninsular state of Qatar. There were certainly a lot of tough things going on 35,000 feet below, but life was peaceful and smooth up in the cabin.

There has, of course, been a lot of other plane rides recently. A month ago I watched volcanoes outside my window, saying goodbye to Guatemala and Central America. I flew into Dallas and picked out landmarks deeply routed in my suburban childhood. A few weeks later I saw Manhattan and that impressive skyline for the first time. Then I flew right over Seville and Madrid where memories are still so vivid I get anxious every time I think about the possibility of going back.

I do enjoy these maps, because most of the time the cabin is dark and everything outside the window is dark too. It is worth imagining what is going on below, filling in blank space, thinking how massive and impossible the world is to see. With the Middle East glittering in the distance, expansive deserts sprawling out below, sometimes I think about just how far away some very special people are, and that is a little sad, because they really are far in more ways than one when Mesopotamia is outside your window.