The airport chairs were the first sign this day would break me.
Too hard to be comfortable, too soft to be useful and too shiny to trust.
The kind of chair that says, “You will suffer here, and you will do it politely.”
Around me, the entire terminal hummed with festive energy.
Crying children, jingling carry-on zippers, distant boarding calls spoken by someone who clearly did not care about diction.
My flight was scheduled for 10:45 a.m.
Naturally, at 12:32 p.m., the screen still read:
“Gate opening soon.”
Soon.
Soon is the most dangerous word in the English language.
Soon is where sanity goes to die.
Families sprawled across the floor like abandoned luggage.
A businessman was having a full existential crisis over a tuna sandwich.
A toddler in dinosaur pyjamas kept staring at me like I was responsible for the delay.
I checked the departures board again.
Still “soon.”
Always “soon.”
There’s something special about holiday travel, special in the way food poisoning is special.
You start full of optimism, imagining hot chocolate, family hugs, and festive cheer. Within minutes, you’re trapped in a metal tube that hasn’t moved in two hours, listening to someone bite pretzels loudly enough to summon ancient demons.
And yet we do this every year.
We queue.
We shuffle.
We wait for hours in “priority” lines that clearly have no concept of priority.
We sprint between gates like undertrained Olympians.
We crush our emotional support snacks during turbulence.
Meanwhile, outside the airport window, a plane slowly reversed for what felt like 45 minutes.
Not taking off.
Not landing.
Just… repositioning.
A metaphor in the shape of aluminium.
And somewhere in that fluorescent-lit limbo, it hit me.
Not the “busy season” clichés people love to throw at us.
No, the real feeling, the human one.
The sense that you’re moving constantly but travelling nowhere.
The fatigue that hides inside your bones.
The emotional delays that pile up: sleep, rest, boundaries, joy that are all scheduled for “soon.”
We carry so much this month.
The pressure to close out the year cleanly.
The invisible weight of other people’s expectations.
Our own exhaustion disguised as determination.
And just like airport travel, nobody outside truly understands it.
They don’t see the waiting.
The internal rerouting.
The way we brace ourselves quietly for turbulence.
The way the holiday season stretches time like a badly made spreadsheet.
But here’s the thing the airport taught me that day:
Even when you feel suspended mid-air and everything says “soon,” not “now”.
You’re still moving.
You’re still inching forward.
You’re still getting there.
Slowly, messily, inconveniently but you’re getting there.
And that brings me back to the departure board.
At 1:04 p.m., the gate finally opened.
People stood.
Stretched.
Reassembled their dignity.
A small child yelled, “FINALLY!” so loudly that even the tannoy paused.
We got on the plane.
We sat.
We sighed.
And eventually we lifted off the ground.
Not gracefully.
Not on time.
But together.
It may feel like you’re waiting for something to tell you it’s safe to move forward. But you are getting there.
And when you do?
It won’t matter how long the journey took, just that you arrived.
And right now, it’s Christmas. So, take a big breath, have a fantastic time, wherever you are and whoever your with; here’s to you and your family; enjoy!
Until next week,
Christiaan
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