Sitting in the crowded waiting area with a good hour ahead of me that day, without a phone or computer to distract me, I was keenly aware of the level and variety of noise around me. People were talking on their phones, saying nothing as far as I could tell, adding to the din of a television no one was watching over my head, the roar of aircraft outside, the announcements inside: a melting pot of noise.
I changed seats, hoping to find somewhere quieter, but it was as though the noise level in the airport was a constant, a given, something that was simply part of the overall experience. It seemed to add hours to my wait and take years off my life.
Since then, I can't travel without taking note of the level of noise people are being subjected to in airports. I have terrible ears, scarred from primitive medical interventions, and in places with high levels of ambient noise, I am easily irritated. That's why I now travel with foam earplugs in my pocket.
In Pearson (the airport that serves Toronto) as with most airports in North America today, every waiting area has its own flat screen TV, broadcasting nothing but bad and/or useless news. The irony is that, in this day and age, most people in airports and elsewhere are plugged into their Pods & Berries, making the TVs superfluous.
The last time I was in Pearson, the only one paying attention to the TV seemed to be me, and it wasn't the content that caught my eyes and ears: I was wishing I had a remote control with a mute button, like the one I rely upon heavily at home to spare me the blare of commercials. It was something of an awakening for me.
I thought about writing to the GTAA to tell them that they could save a lot of money by removing the TVs, selling them, and cancelling their cable bill. In my not-so-humble opinion, it would be the first step they could take to change the airport's status as worst airport in Canada, an honour it truly deserves.
But the awakening I speak of did not result in an indignant letter to the GTAA, but gave birth instead to an idea: airports designed as refuges from the noise of travelling in an airplane. At the very least I thought airport designers should consider creating media-free zones where people had no wi-fi or cell coverage, where they could give themselves a break FROM ALL THAT NOISE!
It also led me to coin the phrase 'meditate while-u-wait'. I imagined not just airports, but hospital waiting rooms, subway cars...anyplace where people were sitting and waiting: to arrive, to see someone, to give or receive bad news...
I put together a concept poster, showing a man sitting in a chair, accompanied by instructions on how to meditate in a public space. Fantasizing about getting the campaign adopted by the TTC, I emailed my concepts to a non-profit in Toronto called the Centre for Social Innovation - or CSI - and after several weeks heard nothing from them. I called them twice and left messages - one voicemail and one with the person who answered the phone at their Spadina office - but again, no one got back to me. It was like the David Lynch Foundation all over again, as though no one wanted to hear my ideas.
So I created a website just to spread the message of 'Meditate While-U-Wait' with my friends via email and FB, and asked a few of them to translate the instructions into French, Spanish, and Farsi for me. Still, I got the sense that my ideas were disappearing into a black hole.
Now I have abandoned all my other online efforts to be a writer and teacher in favour of developing the phone app. The blogs and websites I once had such hopes for are no longer accessible to the public, though I visit them from time to time, cannabilizing ideas and text to integrate on this blog in hope that this focus will help my ideas catch on.
The irony is that I am developing an iPhone app, but I don't have an iPhone, nor a Smartphone, not even a cell.
I'm just looking for an effective strategy to spread these ideas.
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