Once I commented to someone that I loved airports. A nearby eavesdropper asked me sardonically if I was a masochist. The question stuck with me and I've considered it over the years while traveling. Obviously the question wasn't literal and was certainly rhetorical; the commenter was making a statement that airports are inconvenient, dirty, and unpleasant. It's fashionable, even ostensibly virtuous, to complain about airport experiences. Long delays, inept security, and discourteous travelers make for facile storytelling. These are superficial impressions. Instead, looking beyond physical discomforts, airports have a certain wonder to them both abstractly and literally. 

There are several reasons we should reconsider these negative cultural reflexes. To start, for a few hours airports put us in proximity to people representing places and cultures we would never otherwise experience. Exposure to "the other" can be an incredibly enriching opportunity. Airports are the confluence of so many life stories and the synergy occuring is nearly constant, if one just looks for it. The intertwining and mixing of human threads is not only a powerful, abstract picture, but it has a real effect on all participants. When we engage with this amalgamation of human lives, we are ourselves put into a position to change, to transform.

Traveling also represents some degree of wealth building. This might be surprising if you don't think of yourself as wealthy, but consider for a moment: if you're traveling as part of employment, you're involved in a gainful process. While you may not be individually wealthy, you clearly have some inherent skill or ability motivating an employer to dispatch you on a for-profit mission. You're being compensated either via salary, commission, or even an hourly rate. It's very unlikely you're paying for the travel expenses out-of-pocket. If you're traveling leisurely, the point is even more salient; you've accumulated enough that you can (a) afford travel expenses and (b) it's not necessary for you to be working at the same time. Wealth is a relative concept, but if you're in an airport there's a high degree of likelihood you're not only paying your bills, but have the opportunity to accumulate, which is a basic definition of wealth building. 

I don't want to be naive or overly romanticize travel hubs. Certainly travel can be painful. Additionally, because people are deeply flawed, these threads of travel carry with them both the beautiful and ugly parts of human lives. Nonetheless, airports are living things, both in representation and literalness. Each human life that passes through an airport carries with it a past and a future. Take each of those threads and scale it to tens-of-thousands each day at any major airport, then again to the many airports around the world, and the amount of trade, relationship, experience, potential, and opportunity occuring is astounding. 

There is a certain awe to it and I stand by my original statement: I love airports.