As a treasure hunt guy, I travel a lot.  It’s one of the joys of the biz, and also—on occasion—a bit of a drag.  International travel only accentuates those dual feelings of exhilaration and exhaustion.  After all, how wonderful it is to be paid to visit an exotic city!  But oh my, the jet lag, customs inspections, passport control, surly taxi drivers, etc. Does travel have to be so tiring?!  Often there’s very little time to even enjoy the host city. On a typical “treasure hunt trip”, I jet in, play-test clues, tend to hunt logistics, assemble materials, meet with the client, deliver the program, and rush to catch my flight back to San Francisco.  As any business person who travels for a living can tell you, it’s nice to get away, to have a nice meal or two in a scenic setting, but it isn’t exactly a vacation.

Still, if you must spend a portion of your life on the road, you might as well take an interest in the journey.  How often do we get caught up in the rush to “arrive”, thereby losing sight of the here and now!  I see this often in my treasure hunts, with participants focusing on the end result – winning – and missing the lessons of the activity:  collaboration, communication, conflict resolution, strategy, etc.  It’s as if their minds have flown away from their bodies, lost in the fantasy of how it will feel to hold up a trophy and defeat their peers, and missing the thoughts and feelings they're having throughout the day.

So I try to be present – not only during my hunt gigs, but also while I’m moving from one city to the next. Inevitably I spend a good deal of time in airports, those curious buffer zones that smooth the transition from one culture to another.  In many ways, all airports are similar – the hard, industrial lighting, the synthetic chairs, the taciturn security personnel.  But inevitably there are differences, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, as if the vibe of the city somehow penetrates the airport and infuses it with local character.  Las Vegas’ McCarrin Airport, for example, is glitzy and brash – like Vegas itself – with slot machines in the terminals and a huge video screen in the baggage claim showing previews of casino shows.  Orlando International Airport, on the other hand, is all about Disney, with brightly-colored cartoon characters nearly everywhere you look (especially the ubiquitous Mickey Mouse), lending the place a cheerily-garish theme-park feeling.  In essence, airports are a preview of the host city, as packaged and processed by the local department of tourism.

Airports are great places for people-watching. Family dramas play out in real time.  Lovers reunite.  Siblings squabble.  Business people set up virtual offices.   For the most part, people are civil and polite in airports, but there’s a lot of tension and impatience to be observed as well. I recall one time in Paris’ Charles De Gaulle airport when a bomb scare had forced a main hallway in the check-in-desk area to be closed for over an hour.  As the crowd grew, people continued to elbow their way forward to the barrier rope, as if each small gain in territory would accelerate their progress toward their destination.  There is an expression in Japanese that seems apt to me, loosely translated as, “When on the road leave your courtesy at home.”   Alas, when traveling, people around the world so often give in to their impatience, thinking only of where they need to get to and not where they are, whom they are with, and how this impacts their fellow travelers

So I want to propose a game to play at airports and while on the road, to slow ourselves down and to reconnect with the present.  Start by counting your footsteps.  See how many steps it takes to walk from security to your gate. Stay focused on each particular footstep, noticing how it feels, observing how the floor changes from tile to carpet to moving sidewalk, whatever.  Try not to count ahead or make predictions about how many steps it’ll take to reach your final location. Just stay focused on the steps. From time to time, slow down and stand still; look around and see if you can locate three interesting people in your sightline, or three unusual architectural details of the airport.  Then continue walking and counting steps from where you left off.  Stop again after 100 or so steps and inhale deeply, attempting to identify three unique airports smells (ugh!).  Continue on to your gate and there close your eyes and try to identify three specific airport sounds, sounds you might not hear anywhere else. 

I think you’ll find that slowing down like this opens up new worlds.  Airports become fascinating places, packed with sights and sounds and sensations.  We like to think that our final destination, our hotel, is the final arrival…but truly, we are all constantly arriving -- at the here, at the now.