The Self Contained Traveler

Business travel can be lonely at times. Not that much more lonely than living alone, but when I’m home I am home, and when I am about in the neighborhood, I having a pretty good chance of running into someone I know, up to and including someone I went to grade school with. When I am on the road and out and about, I am stranger among friends – in reality, a stranger among strangers, but somehow it seems like everyone else knows each other ;-) So there is this notion of the ‘self-contained traveler’, where one’s inner dialogue substitutes for inter-dialogue,  one’s phone acts as a tether to the familiar, and, aside from a friendly waiter or waitress, there is no recourse for discourse. It makes me sad to think that there are some people that live this way – people who have lost everyone, or, perhaps, people who everyone has lost. When you think about how our very survival depended on being in a group, it is not too much of a leap to see how being cast out leads to a type of psychological death, even if not a physical death. So the next time you are out and about and you see someone eating alone, ask him to sit with you, there is a very good chance that he might be able to expense your meal ;-)