Among the many ways to categorize most air travelers is their choice between aisle seat and window seat. (No, I don’t think anyone really chooses a middle seat).
Aisle-seat travelers are focused on convenience. They can get up any time they want without climbing over someone or making everyone else in their row move. The freedom that convenience wins is the ability to walk to the back of the plane to use the tiny restrooms and maybe get a nice leg-stretch. Aisle-sitters see flying as a chore, something to endure.
Window-seat fliers are people who, despite suffering the many large and small inconveniences of modern air travel and getting crammed into smaller and smaller spaces on-board, still see a little adventure in the flight experience. At least that’s my take, as someone who chooses a window seat 100 percent of the time. The adventure comes in witnessing the dramatic moments of takeoff and landing and watching the country and shy reveal themselves in the hours in between.
Yes, you might nod off occasionally as you wonder which river, lake, town or highway that is sliding by miles below you. But for every instance your attention wanders, there’s another where you’re surprised by the chance appearance of something happening in the sky around you — thunderheads building up in the distance — or down there on the surface.
Maybe, after a long landing approach over the sea, on a coast far from your own, a freighter will glide beneath you amid infinitely scalloped waters, churning toward port, its bow wake creating a perfect chevroned symmetry in the last light of the evening.