HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 15, 2025 – Years ago, I used to fly back and forth between New York City and Amsterdam on People’s Airline ($99 one way; byob, baby!). Every now and then when I arrived back in New York, I would pass groups of men sitting on the floor in the arrivals area. The first few times I saw them, I didn’t really think twice about it; New York being New York, there was never a shortage of oddities to behold. But one time my curiosity got the better of me, so I asked a passing flight attendant why the men were sitting there. What he told me has stuck with me all these years: He said they were waiting for their souls to arrive.

Being an atheist at the time, I didn’t believe in souls, so I laughed it off as ridiculous. The attendant explained further that sometimes they’d sit there for days until they were certain their souls had caught up with them. What I didn’t realize, in glancing at these men in passing, is that they would become one of those scenes that would haunt me for the rest of my life: I can still see them sitting motionless on the cold hard floor, not talking or eating, their heads bowed, waiting.

Just waiting.

As a born-again believer, I do now unquestioningly believe in souls, and I think about those men and what their days-long silent protest at the airport hoped to accomplish. I hesitate to say they didn’t achieve their goal. I understand how jet lag can disorient you well beyond normal fatigue, but they must have understood jet lag, too, and could distinguish between it and a tardy soul. Surely it wasn’t just jet lag that drove them to do what they did?

I’ve tried researching this phenomenon online and have come up empty. Nothing’s been uploaded to the internet about people who wait at the airport for their souls to arrive. Could the flight attendant have been pulling my leg? Or was this an Olde Worlde tradition that has since passed into oblivion? It reminds me of the stories of North American natives who, back in the day, would refuse to have their pictures taken, as they equated picture-taking with soul-stealing.

Somewhat related in spirit if not in mode is a guy I know in Germany who knows a guy who won’t travel farther in a day than he can comfortably walk (~20 miles). If he goes on a 60-mile journey by car or train, he does it over three days, stopping every 20 miles to spend the night at a local hotel. He’s quite religious about this. I used to laugh at him, but now I think he might be onto something.

What about you? Does any of this resonate with you? Do you think we’re moving around too much and too fast, lured by cheap travel options and the pressure to do more and go farther in less time? How is this affecting your soul? As the Bible attests, we used to measure distance by how far people could walk in a day, but now we peg distance to car travel time. “Just five minutes to the mall!” really means a two-hour walk, and usually along a busy highway. When we frame travel distance by car rather than by foot, what affect does it have on our perception of time? Does it bias us against taking the more leisurely travel options or against taking the scenic route? And if it does bias our decisions, what are we missing out on? How are we hurting our souls in the process?

Did those “crazy” guys sitting on the floor at the airport actually have it right?

A soul is a terrible thing to abuse. If we’re discombobulating our souls by our travel modes, we need to radically consider slowing things down.