An artificial cocoon...

We had the experience of taking a a spur of the moment flight to Atlanta this week.  As we were flying out I started to think about the experience of flying in this modern age of instantaneous digital communication.  Strangely enough the plane is one of the last places where we are forced to be totally out of touch with our friends/family.  Arguably I could go camping and be out of touch also, but in my mind that is a bit more of a choice than airlines forcing passengers to turn off cell phones and not providing an Internet connection.  I'm not trying to advocate allowing passengers to use Internet and cell phones on their flight, but more thinking about the experience itself. 

When we left on our flight we had a lot of things on our mind and we had spent the previous 24 hrs on the phone and on email pretty regularly and suddenly we were spending 5 hrs completely disconnected.  While I didn't forget about everything that was going on in our lives it was almost as though for a few hrs it was not immediately in our face.  Maybe it was a way to avoid thinking about and facing realities in our lives, but it was worth it whatever the cause was.