Flying Zombies con't

My uncle just died and I felt a pull to go back to the States to be with my family, but there was also something else.

The desire to fly. There is no doubt in my mind that flying is an addition, and I am feeling the pull to get on a plane just like the vast majority of my fellow millions of air travellers from the UK alone. That pull goes on somewhere in the background, like a low level hum, and enters into our decision to fly even though many of us have got it: that flying and preventing catastrophic climate chaos aren ' t a match made in heaven.

How do I know it ' s an addition? Well I felt something completely beyond conscious awareness pulling me. It was like I taken over and the impulse woke in me to ‘ go somewhere ' . Like one of those zombies in a bad sci fi film that suddenly turns into something else. The flying zombie in me surfaced occationally, it became something that I was aware of, kind of gnawing at me, that surfaced in a pull to go to India this winter for instance. The clearest I can be about it was that it was a pull to go somewhere else. I wanted to escape like most people who fly, escape and go somewhere else. I think it ' s a s simple as that, and then again it isn ' t.

Flying like all behaviours is complex and there is no one driver. If you have a look at the travel pages they show beauty and epic sights to see. But really once you have had a look at something beautiful and grand, what next? Sight seeing is vastly overrated in my book. A day or so at it and then I ' m finished, but then again my stamina for shopping is pathetic so draw your own conclusions. But still I think sight seeing is an empty promise, but one that is backed up by the need to escape and go somewhere else. The addictive behaviour reinforces it. You think you are going to see something or spend a week on the beach in blazing hot weather, but really you just want to escape.

This somewhere else is our mind, or the need to escape from the tyranny of our minds. Our minds and personality structures, being unreal (they are sheer constructions that do not exist except in our beliefs) create pain, and all the pain we create and experience, that we feel sublimely, is the pain of our particular existence. We want to escape from our minds and our personalities, and ‘ be somewhere else ' . Our confusion is that by going somewhere else physically, we obviously bring our minds with us. We cannot escape, except very temporarily by entering into some sort of addictive behaviours, like flying somewhere else. It ' s an addiction on par with drinking, only it gives a more wholesome and less immediate and more expanded hit. The need to get away can be fulfilled by going by car or train, and this will do, and it works for journeys to Europe , but the element that flying has is the quick hit; the rush.

Many powerful additions have that aspect. I have been reading ‘ The Tipping Point ' by Malcolm Gladwell. He talks about how a heroin addict doesn ' t take a small dose often, they get an overwhelming hit 4-5 times a day. This ‘ hit ' takes them out of their normal way of being. Smoking works the same way, smoking gets nicotine into the blood steam fast and you get a hit. We are all after our hit, and flying does that same thing. It ' s a quick hit, a piece of modern magic. You get on a plane and presto! … .you are half way round the world in a few hours.

Taking a boat or driving wouldn ' t be the same. It would be an experience but it ' s not the same. Add into that the convenience and short time it takes to get there that makes holiday possible to a whole slew of places that just couldn ' t happen with two week annual leaves.

There are many reasons for flying and for many they have to do it for work. But most flying happens for leisure. There is a sense of being able to do it because we can, we like that. It feels like being able to explore all of our possibilities. To go great distances and see different cultures, are all reasons to fly. We like to test our limits, the glamour of flying, the glamour of being in a new and interesting places, it is all part of what goes into the mix. But the pain of creating a self restraint on this desire was what alerted me to the insidiousness of this desire which leads to the behaviour.

My decision since working on Transition Town Totnes was been to not fly. And I haven ' t, but when the opportunity arose to be able to, and make use of my get out clause, what George Monbiot calls ‘love miles' made an irresistible proposition, and I jumped.

Lots more remains to be said about our flying habits, addictive and otherwise. Like the way we use air travel. It's become a right and a way of life. We can do it thinking nothing of consequences (as in many other environmentally or self destructive behaviours). We fly, not having to offer a reason or in anyway justify ourselves, we just do it. Like the hen party that has just popped down next to me as I am sitting in Bristol International Airport, 20 or so women with ‘Karen's Barcelona Babes, July 2007' tee shirts on and complete with Karen herself in wedding gear. What more to be said?

Naresh August 07