Aligned & Awake: The Woman in the Zurich Lounge
In which I spend five hours in an airport lounge and a woman clearing plates teaches me everything I needed to know
Aligned & Awake
My reflections on life through travel, human design, energy, astrology, and emotional clarity. Not as a guru. Just one person figuring it out in real time.
There’s a woman in the Swiss Air lounge clearing plates with a smile usually reserved for people who’ve recently fallen in love or found twenty dollars in an old winter coat.
I’m in Zurich with a five-and-a-half-hour layover on my way to Spain, standing out on the terrace watching planes take off into a pale grey sky while warm early-summer air moves through my hair.
Airports are extraordinary when you stop behaving like a traumatized commuter and actually look at them.
The terrace sits right beside the runway, so close you can hear the engines roar to life before takeoff. The wind carries the smell of jet fuel and rain. Tiny airport vehicles zip around the tarmac like caffeinated ants. Little carts towing mountains of luggage, fuel trucks weaving between aircraft worth more than entire neighbourhoods, ground crew in neon jackets performing what appears to be an aggressively choreographed dance production called Delayed Flight to Frankfurt.
One tiny mistake and the whole thing turns into a Netflix documentary.
And yet somehow it works.
Planes reverse out of parking spots. Humans arrive from every corner of the earth carrying neck pillows, duty-free Toblerones, emotional baggage, regular baggage, oversized hiking backpacks, screaming toddlers, and occasionally one man wearing sandals with absolutely criminal toenails.
Airports are humanity in compression socks.
I’ve spent the last hour outside on this terrace listening to planes thunder overhead while soft jazz drifts out from the lounge behind me like the airport hired a mildly divorced pianist to emotionally regulate us all.
And I keep noticing this woman.
She’s clearing plates. Wiping tables. Restocking cups. Smiling at people. Present smiling. The sort that lives in the eyes first.
I earned my way into this lounge.
Gold status sounds glamorous until you remember it’s mostly achieved through exhaustion, delayed flights, airport sandwiches that cost as much as a small appliance, and dragging yourself across time zones wondering what day it is. A lot of work built this. A lot of movement. A lot of mornings hauling luggage through terminals on four hours of sleep, telling yourself it’s all going somewhere.
I left behind the life I spent years building. The marriage. The house. The routines. The version of myself everyone understood. Now I bounce between countries carrying enough electronics to start a small media company from Gate C17.
Some mornings I wake up excited. Other mornings I wake up wondering if I’ve accidentally become a woman whose entire personality is now “airport.”
There’s something mildly unhinged about knowing the layout of Heathrow better than your own future. Home is still a question I’m carrying rather than a place I can point to.
Standing out here though, watching planes disappear into clouds beside people who have also spent years chasing arrival; status, success, better seats, the sacred hierarchy of airline privilege, something clarified.
Human beings really said, “What if we made boarding groups into a personality test?”
And then this woman clearing plates cuts right through it.
She looked more peaceful than half the businessmen inhaling breakfast sausage and stale croissants while staring into laptops with the emotional range of drywall.
There’s a sentence for LinkedIn.
I don’t know exactly what I’m building yet. Writing feels expansive one day and like entering a creative haunted house the next. Some nights I feel deeply aligned. Other nights I’m googling rental prices while eating airport cheese cubes like a woman preparing for economic collapse.
You can arrive somewhere beautiful internally long before your life fully makes sense externally.
She reminded me of that. A woman clearing plates in an airport lounge, with tired eyes, a genuine smile, completely in her own moment.
Maybe happiness isn’t always hiding inside the giant milestones. Sometimes it’s standing between flights, with the wind in your hair, listening to planes scream across the sky, watching a woman with a gentle smile live inside her life so fully that it stops you mid-thought.
This terrace. This strange in-between.
Another plane lifts off the runway and banks hard into the clouds. I watch it until it disappears.
I keep waiting to arrive somewhere that will finally feel like enough. And then a woman clearing plates in an airport lounge smiles like someone who has never once confused happiness with destination, and I remember.
It’s already here. The awe. The joy. The small unremarkable moments that turn out to be the whole point. Not something to chase, earn, or wait for. Just something to notice when you’re standing still long enough to look.
Tell me…
When was the last time a small, unexpected moment stopped you in your tracks? Tell me in the comments. I want to hear about the ones that sneak up on you.