Everywhere And Nowhere; Staying Grounded in a life in the Clouds
How to Make Sense of Losing a Childhood Idol
“Move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. Walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food. Open your mind. Get off the couch. Move”
Every episode of his insightful foodie travel show, No Reservations, Anthony Bourdain would introduce himself in the beginning credits with his signature soothing, contemplative rhythm. "I'm Anthony Bourdain. I write, I travel, I eat, and I'm hungry for more." The travel channel darling chef turned gastronomical explorer started with this innovative show in 2005 to investigate the bond between people and food, diving into different cultures stomach first and eating everything from blood soup in Chang Mai to fermented shark in Iceland. Whatever came his way he rolled with a joyful curiosity and a marked intelligence that filled in the details later. Bourdain introduced Americans to the foreign and tried to make it less foreign. He showed that at the heart of humanity, we are all equal, we are all deserving of a good life, we all have a valuable purpose on this planet, no matter how small it may seem. He was brazen, opinionated without arrogance, lovable and charming to anyone who he interviewed or was interviewed by. He was without a doubt my childhood idol and I wanted to be exactly like him.
Bourdain traveled the world the way most of us wished we could; with compassion and daring gusto, disregard for pomp and circumstance and embracing the wild, weird, and interesting. A relentless investigator for truth and joy in food and travel, his attitude and style helped spark my own desire to explore the world with this same sense of boldness and fearless attitude. I wanted to create unique memories rather than buy them on a bus tour. Fall in love with your experiences, fall in love with people, fall in love with yourself along the way. I am ravenously in love with love, and the idea that it doesn't just come prepackaged- you have to discover it by acting on your instincts, doing things that make you uncomfortable, embracing unexpected thrills to fully appreciate it.
What was so refreshing and rock star chic about Bourdain can be said in a million ways and at least that many people around the world have voiced their favorable opinions on the travel enthusiast's emotional contribution. What I admired greatly about Bourdain was his conviction to reject the idea that he had to cater to anyone to be successful on television. He didn't create content designed to please the audience or form a personal that might be less offensive to a certain demographic. He never glossed over an aspect of the culture he visited just because it was uncomfortable or upsetting to watch. He was himself, on and off camera, and developed a reputation for offering honest portrayals of the places he traveled. The authenticity of this type of narration is refreshing and engaging, creating a new angle of travel shows with enough innocence to be endearing but a very distinct edge that made his commentary addicting. He traveled under the pretense of touring exotic cuisine but the enlightening conversations he spun with local residents and chefs made him a true journalist.
He was not a voice echoing a pretty tourism magazine's voice, but a sensitive and sarcastic humanitarian with a lust for life and the people in it. Describe him as a genius and place him on a pedestal and he would laugh sardonically and call you a moron. In his mind, he was a guy who knew about cooking and food, and liked to travel and talk about it in a relatively intelligent and knowledgable manner. Such was the self effacing mannerisms that gave him an exceptionally humble reputation and ironically made him more appealing.
Why is this so unique? These days, travel inspired Instagram accounts are cultivated, tailored images that are anything but spontaneous and authentic. A beautiful, thin woman in her 20's looks over the highest viewpoint in Ko Phi Phi, her expression serene and bright as though she has finally found enlightenment in Thailand. She has a link to her outfit in her bio. The sunset delicately graces her features and she gazes outwards into the sea. What do you not see in this picture? The 30 mosquito bites that are on her legs as she was climbing up the hill at twilight, the clouds of gnats she struggled to fight against as she moved, forgetting her bug spray at the hotel. This serene expression in the photo is likely a form of acceptance to her fate as a bug's chew toy, complacency disguised as tranquility.
Fantasy is fine, and I love indulging in a whimsical daydream about traveling to an exotic, beautiful place. But if your expectation of the foreign is of pure magic, you might be disappointed to find the locals love to eat at McDonalds, for example, or become disillusioned to see the other things left out of your favorite Instagram celebrity's photographs, such as the carefully cropped buzzing crowd of tourists interrupting your peaceful photo of the Mona Lisa, Taj Mahal, or insert famous destination here. It is important to visualize a more accurate portrayal of the city of your dreams. If Bourdain had accompanied this Instagram host on her twilight walk in Ko Phi Phi, maybe he would have filmed the actual walk, explained the origin of the bugs, depicted their life stories, bonded with the misery and owned it as part of the adventure, and ate something made from these bugs. He might have still made the journey fun and whimsical and beautiful, but he pursued a desire to never hide the dark, instead to elevate it as part of the balance with beauty and light.
Movement in between cultural lines, addressing the "other" as your friend and not as your observational subject ; this behavior is what separates tourists from travelers. While a tourist goes and observes a different culture, a traveler will jump into it, get dirty, make memories with the locals, and ask them about their lives personally instead of reading about it on a brochure. The impact he made on people who watched his shows, read his books, and interacted with him personally cannot be understated. This was a man who had lived an amazing life with the best job on the planet with no signs of slowing down anytime soon. He had a successful career, was a brilliant thinker, had countless people supporting him, who loved and admired him. Everyone wanted to be him, who wouldn't want this job?
This is why, on June 8th, 2018, I was shocked to hear that he had left this world by suicide. It was just a phrase that went through me and was not absorbed until I scrolled through the internet and saw page after page of memorial articles, trying to grasp the horrible impossibility that had somehow become reality. Are we actually in the Upside Down from Stranger Things? Politics is beyond corrupt and my heroes are one by one leaving this Earth. It was Princess Leah, Prince, David Bowie, and now Anthony Bourdain? I read the articles in actual shock.
Bourdain was and is an American treasure, a world ambassador supporting peace and mutual understanding between countries, attempting to eliminate artificial social boundaries keeping us suspicious of each other's strange ways. He expressed a sense of grounded humility that isn't normally seen among celebrities. As a teenager I looked up to him and imagined working for him on his show, No Reservations, jumping into one bold eating adventure after another. If I saw him on my flight, I can only imagine the wonderful conversation we would have, the restaurants we would chat about and debate which has better food, Korea or Japan. (for me it's impossible to choose sides). I would tell him how inspired I was by his work, and how much he means to the world, to our collective education. I'd definitely apologize for the airplane food, but insist that it's getting better each quarter.
“Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go. ”
You can go to the ends of the earth, you can meet people who fall in love with you and you fall in love with them, you can eat everything on the face of this planet, you can exist on the plane of gray between black and white, free to move about the world as you choose and say whatever you want to say, laugh at death and romance and everything that life throws your way, and you might even write a successful book and create a franchise of adventurous travel shows that enlighten the spirit and motivate the body to get off the couch and book that ticket to elsewhere...
You might be all the things you want to be, and you can still feel like you shouldn't exist.
When I learned that Anthony Bourdain was gone I felt like the last unicorn had been shot in front of me. Is that dramatic? I don't think so. He represented something much bigger than himself, that of hope and a future of globalization as a form of cultural appreciation rather than appropriation. He brought light and clarity into a world that seems so chaotic and sad, took the weary and poor and told their stories with compassion without a tone of white savior syndrome.
CNN's official statement regarding his death: “It is with extraordinary sadness we can confirm the death of our friend and colleague, Anthony Bourdain. The world made him a unique storyteller. His talents never ceased to amaze us and we will miss him very much. Our thoughts and prayers are with his daughter and family at this incredibly difficult time.”
Forever in Flight, The Importance of Stillness
Anthony Bourdain was constantly on the go, traveling most of the year filming his shows, sleeping in anonymous hotel room after hotel room, without a true sense of stability other than the hotel lobby and the film crew. He spent an enormous amount of time on planes, in flight, and waiting in airports. That must have worn on him after years and years of filming his various shows. He once claimed in an interview that he was on the road and in the air about 240 days out of the year.
Shit, I thought listening to him speak in an interview about the stresses of constant travel, I think he's describing my life. I basically live in hotels and airports, ending a trip with a relief that I won't have to speak to someone for the rest of the day unless I really feel compelled to do so. It's a job that centers you in the public and forces you to interact with 1,000's of people during a single trip. At the same time it can be incredibly isolating. I don't travel nearly as much as Bourdain did, but I can definitely relate to the lifestyle he adopted for himself.
Aviators are always in motion, planning for their next traveling adventure, getting ready for a working trip, moving in between gates at the airport, hustling to prepare for service, getting ready to meet the crew for dinner on a layover, attempting to get to the airport on time for an early sign in... we hardly ever have a moment's rest while working, so when we are finished with a 3 day trip the first thing we want to do is do absolutely nothing. It's very common for a flight attendant to not leave his or her apartment the day after a trip. Sometimes it's nice to just relax, stay silent in the stillness of a day off, and recharge. Depending on your personality, you might become restless alone like I do and reach out to friends in your base or hop on another plane and travel somewhere for fun, or you might treasure your time alone and adopt a domestic oriented life on your off days.
It is isolating though, no matter what your personality is. It takes extra work to see your fellow aviation friends, and scheduling activities usually needs to be done a few weeks in advance. I've had great luck in making spontaneous adventures on my off days, but sometimes it gets old texting everyone I know and love in New York to give them awareness of my presence. Most of the time, 9-5 ers will assume you're not there unless they hear from you, which is fair.
The job is also very unpredictable, and you are required to roll with the punches more times than you'd care to admit. On my last trip, my entire crew was rerouted suddenly to fly an extra 7 hours of flight time. We had landed in ATL (Atlanta) and were originally scheduled to fly directly to CLT (Charlotte) for a quick and easy 40 minute flight. Instead, the reroute made us fly from ATL - LAS (Las Vegas) and then immediately back LAS-ATL. That route is a total of 8 hours blocked flying time, compared to our originally scheduled 40 minute flight.
My crew had all made plans in Charlotte, and had woken up at 3AM for this trip, so you can imagine how traumatizing this reroute was for us. It was so cruel.
There's no predictability in aviation-- the plans you make in Paris could be negated by a delay, the mechanical issue on your vacation trip to Los Angeles might force you to miss the wedding you're looking forward to attending. Making plans for a layover accumulates a certain level of anxiety with it; sometimes I don't even bother letting friends know I'm coming because I might be too tired to see anyone when I get to the hotel, if I get there at all.
To be fair, reroutes don't happen frequently, but when they do it's a real kick in the balls.
Aviators are always everywhere and nowhere at once. We flutter and barely stop to catch a meal in a city and enjoy the nightlife before we must catch our flight back to somewhere new. It's a life that allows you to jump out of the rat race, a strange comfort to know that I don't take my work home with me and don't have any paperwork to fill out unless there is a medical issue on my flight. I have the freedom to travel when and where I want (as long as I can bid it), and can pursue other passions when I'm not flying. I'm currently studying Italian and take barre classes, I run, see theater shows whenever possible, and travel on my own during off days. Many flight attendants have their own businesses or work a second job.
With such divine freedom, it's very hard to get us all together to hang out in a casual social environment. Our schedules often don't match up perfectly; my friend Maria and I relate to an accurate meme with the caption reading :
"By age 35 you should run into friends and say "WE SHOULD HANG OUT SOON!" twice a week. You will never hang out. You'll just scream this at each other until one of you dies."
Just substitute "by age 35" with "as a flight attendant" and it's exactly right.
The problem with our jobs is the numbers of people that we meet on trips; we spend a full three days with a crew, talking about ourselves, our love lives, our troubles, our family dramas, all in a move to connect and become comfortable with each other as quickly as possible. It's called Jumpseat Therapy, which basically just entails sitting on the designated flight attendant Jumpseat in the galleys together when there's nothing to do on a flight and gossiping to our hearts content. It's my favorite thing, and I've become close with many people I've flown with this way.
However. We meet so many people that faces begin to blur together. I forget people I've flown with just a month prior and shared a glass of wine with at the hotel bar. This is a very common occurrence and it's something that slowly starts to wear on you. The amount of energy you spend getting to know your crew starts to decrease the more you fly because you are constantly meeting new people. We will always have great intentions to hang out after the trip, but then we fly another trip and make new friends and promise to hang out with them too. It's important, however to connect whenever possible and maintain strong ties with the people you bond with. I think that especially in this job, when we bond with crews and then are forced to say goodbye without knowing the next time we will fly together again, it can be a constant practice of detachment that becomes an eventual habit.
Consistency is what we are lacking, so creating a strong, tight knit community should be a priority. We don't do this job for the riches, we don't do it for the fame or glory or power. We do it for the travel benefits and free flights, and we do it because it's fun. We need something else, though, to express our plethora of creative and social energies, otherwise we might go a little bananas.
Treat Yo'Self 2018... and 2019.... and 2020.... and forever.
Nobody is making sure that you're healthy but you. If you don't monitor yourself and your mental state, you might be at risk for a lower mental health state and depression. I think aviation is an industry that tries to maintain such a cheerful, upbeat attitude that it can be difficult to discern who needs help. We are trained professional happy people who often give our emotional energy to a crowd of people who don't treat us with gratitude. It's important to offer support to our fellow aviators if they are feeling lonely or just need someone to listen.
Travel is physically and emotionally draining. Sometimes when I get to my layover all I want to do is lay there and not speak to anyone. Other times I am restless and can't wait to explore the new city I've found myself in. You either have to live in the moment or plan extremely well in advance, there is no in between! Jet Lag will take a toll, even for aviation experts who have allowed their bodies to become somewhat adjusted to the frequent time zone changes. I usually take a 2 hour nap upon arrival in Europe, and spend the day exploring, have dinner with the crew, and try wearing myself out so I sleep a full 8 hours when I eventually make my way back to the hotel. If I don't have that crucial 2 hour nap, I feel like a zombie the whole day. If I nap longer than 2 hours, however, I'll end up waking up at 3AM while my brain struggles to adjust to the time zone.
Time is somewhat irrelevant in the world of aviation- we don't have a typical weekend and we don't work a typical schedule. Nothing is typical, and I believe meditation or yoga is an easy way to stay grounded or centered while on a trip. Yoga phone apps are easy to download, and nearly every city will have a yoga studio nearby a downtown located hotel, or CrossFit depending on your style! Exercise helps clear the mind and gives your brain yummy endorphins and makes you feel like you've accomplished something other than Netflix binging or spending $50 on cocktails. It's easy to succumb to laziness and indulgence once arrived at each layover hotel, especially if it's been a long day of flying. But in my experience, it's better in the long run if you get up and get moving as soon as possible.
Personally I love to run so I'll make sure to fit in a four mile run if the weather is decent enough. The beauty of running is that it's the perfect traveling workout, all you need are gym clothes and running shoes! It's also a great way to get to know the streets of the new place. Meditation is a very important for a frequent traveler's routine, helping you become focused on your thoughts and developing the ability to control potentially toxic emotions. Time is a strange element in our world and we would do better to live fully in the moment.
Many of my flight attendant friends join classes too, especially in New York- it's a great way to have a consistent activity to look forward to, a way to see the same people every week. Dance classes, acting classes, improv, artist groups, language classes... you can do absolutely anything here and use your brain in a different way to help break the monotony of flying.
“That without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, moribund. ”
Treat yourself to a trip on your off days. If you don't use your benefits, aviation will creep up on you and feel like, well, a job. It's not supposed to be a job, it's supposed to be a lifestyle right? So make it an amazing one! If you have a few days off, hop on a plane to the Caribbean and play with dolphins, go explore a new place that you've always had on your bucket list. Get a group together and plan a weekend hike in Salt Lake City. Travel is the reason we do this job, but it surprises me how many flight attendants I meet that are jealous of the places I've been using my benefits. I just stare at them and say, "Are you joking? We have the same exact life, you can go there too. You just have to do it."
Take care of your health! It's literally the most important thing in this career. Whether you're flight crew or if you simply travel constantly for work and pleasure, it's easy to feel disconnected from everything else. With a little effort you can keep a community and support network that will catch you if you feel a bit lonely on those days when everyone else has a trip except for you!
“Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life- and travel - leaves a mark on you. Most of the time, those marks- on your body or on your heart - are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.”
I will always look to Anthony Bourdain for travel advice, and am sad that I'll never get to have him on any of my flights in the future. He taught us and inspired us, and cautioned us that just because a life seems perfect, it rarely ever is. His contribution to the travel industry and to cultural insight will remain his legacy, and I just wish he could have stayed around to continue this work that so many travel lovers relied on for their own motivation to go, see, and do more.
Take care of each other, and happy flying!