Breathing London Air

"not in your books and maps"

September, 2024

I stood, groaning slightly at the weight of the backpack I had gladly shoved above my seat for most of the train ride. The familiar pull at my shoulders told me, as clearly as the concrete flickers of London out the window, that our glorious time in Scotland was at an end.

Resting one hand on the seat to keep my balance in the still-swaying train, I glanced behind me.

There she is.

The little girl whose cheerful chatter had filled the train car the last two hours of our journey was bouncing in her seat beside a very tired-looking woman.

“I can’t wait until I’m in London, Daddy!” she said, grinning up at her dad, who stood in the aisle pulling bags down.

“You’re in London already.” He handed a dark blue backpack to his son, who looked a couple years younger than the girl.

“Not really,” she said, puffing out her chest and looking out the window. Passengers milled around the station of King’s Cross, glancing up at the timetables or down at their phones. “I don’t know what the air is like yet.”

I don’t know what the air is like yet.

As her dad grunted the not-so-romantic reply of “smoky,” my mind clung to her words. Suddenly, a quote from Good Will Hunting¹, a movie I hadn’t seen and probably never will, flashed through my mind—“Michelangelo, you know a lot about him… but I’ll bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel.”

And as the final swaying of the train died and the door opened with its familiar hiss-snap, I couldn’t shake her unspoken argument—that if you hadn’t breathed the air of a place, you hadn’t really been there.

---

I live a lot of life in my head.

Schoolwork, with infinite essays and summaries to write. Assignments from the Author Conservatory. Reading books. Memorizing Scripture. Discussing theology, literature, and whatever else strikes my fancy.

All of that is well and good. But there’s so much of it that any chance to get away—the feel of sun on my arms, the sweaty work of weeding a garden, the hours spent reading picture books to a four-year-old—feel strangely like relief.

My generation has grown up in a digital age. We take things like iPhones, smart watches, and the Internet for granted. We’re used to social media, live streamed church services, and apps that track anything and everything.

This isn’t all bad. Technology has kept me connected to people I would otherwise have gone years without talking with. I’ve forged true friendships with people that I rarely, if ever, see face-to-face.

But we need the air of places.

We need the unedited, unstaged, real places. We need the way the sun slants through leaves that are never perfectly symmetrical. We need the wisps of hair escaping braids and the wrinkled shirts. We need the silence that isn’t silence at all (but certainly isn’t drowned out in 24/7 music), that’s full of breathing and birdsong and the far-off click-clack of trains.

Books are well and good. Intellectual discussions are well and good. Even technology (Substack, anyone?) can be well and good.

It’s not that they’re bad; it’s simply that they’re not enough.

In The Hobbit movies², Gandalf tasks himself with coaxing Bilbo away from his comfortable fireplace and into an adventure with Thorin’s company. “The world is not in your books and maps,” he says. “It’s out there.”

Again, we do need those books. We need those maps.

But we need more than them.

Good fiction and good facts alike are designed for one purpose: to point us to reality. They guide us, explain the world to us, help us see the things that we might miss.

Nothing on earth is as effective at sneaking past the watchful dragons as a good story.

But once you’ve made it past the dragons? You don’t need to tiptoe anymore. You don’t need to cling to books and maps and phones forever—they have their role. When they have finished, let them rest.

If you want to know what London is like, sure, buy a plane ticket on your phone. Look at the map and see how far away it is. Read a book or two that tells you what to see and what not to see.³

And then go. Breathe.

You will never know what London is like—what your own hometown is like—until you breathe its air.

Best of journeys, my friend.

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door… you step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

— Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien

1. I genuinely know next to nothing about this movie, but I know that I looked up this one speech to properly quote it here and it’s full of crude language. So yeah, please don’t take this as an endorsement.

2. I’m aware of the massive controversy that accompanies these movies and do not have enough personal experience to speak to it. 😛 I will say that the first twenty minutes of the first movie are quite enjoyable.

3. High tea is a must. The London Eye? Not so much.