Quotes of the Day

I'm flying across the international date line, but I've lost track somewhere along the line of whether I'm heading east or west. My stomach tells me that it's 3 a.m., but the watch that I'm just turning backward says it's really 6 p.m. Drew Barrymore seemed to have accompanied this same piece of chicken some days ago, and the people in the next row might be Asian-Americans or just Americanized Asians. The Far West is to the east of me now and the Far East is to the west.

It's at just this moment that I realize that I've truly entered the heart of the 21st century — the wonderful, dizzying, global age in which we often don't know where we are, or who, and try to make the most of the conundrum. It had seemed a good idea at the time: needing to fly back to California from Asia after a business trip, just before flying off to Asia from California on another trip, I would spend as little time as possible on the ground so I wouldn't have to change my body clock. The upshot, however, on the calendar, is that I wake up one Sunday in Bali and find myself on Monday in Sydney. On Tuesday (as it seems to me) I'm in California. On Thursday I'm on my way to Singapore, and on Saturday I'm in Delhi. By the following Sunday I'm up at 11,500 ft. (3,500 m) in Ladakh, the whole of Friday seeming to have vanished into thin air. (Monday, by contrast, lasted 36 hours and counting.)

More and more willy-nilly globalists can probably relate to some version of this theme-park ride, an experience we might as well enjoy since to our grandparents it would have seemed like wildest science fiction, and to our grandchildren it will probably seem quaint and slow-moving. Four nights of my week in the clouds I spend on planes, two of them on flights that last more than 15 hours. At dead of night, near the Himalayas, I wake up and enjoy a lunch made up of the cookies and sandwiches I stashed away in my carry-on bag while sitting in an airline lounge some continents ago. My laptop, I realize, is in a left-luggage office in one country, my suitcase is in a hotel storage closet in another, and I and my few valuables seem to be in a third.

Everything becomes curiously inverted when you're five miles above the sea. Children, on the 18 1/2 hour flight from Los Angeles to Singapore, become the very opposite of a breath of fresh air. Home becomes the place you hardly recognize (while that foreign airport comes to seem very much like home). Night becomes the time when you're wide awake. During my two days in California, I try to avoid jet lag by getting up at noon and doing most of my work while everyone else is sleeping.

And movement becomes an unlikely form of extended stillness. I asked a Buddhist monk not long ago (a contemporary Buddhist monk, who takes 75 flights in a year) what he did to keep himself centered and at peace through all these transits. "I look out the window of the plane," he said. "Up there I don't have to do anything. I watch the clouds, the blue sky behind. Really, a plane can be a beautiful way of taking a retreat in the sky."

Movies judder past on my little screen, so I watch the end of Zodiac on a Singapore-Narita flight, having watched the beginning, I think, on Singapore-Delhi. Books blur into one another until the best answer seems to be to read the novels of Haruki Murakami, which feel like the mellifluous sound of Muzak heard during jet lag, with their floating characters situated in Japan but living in the America or Italy of their heads. Just to make my disorientation complete, I get off a plane in Sydney because we are going to take on passengers from another (canceled) flight, then I get onto it again, because it turns out that if the passengers from the canceled flight are put on our plane, our flight will be so delayed that it, too, will have to be canceled.

It is, I know, a very strange way to spend a week. At 5 a.m. in Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport, after traveling 35 hours to get here, I'm not really sure whether I'm meant to be boarding flight 9W1609 to the Himalayan town of Leh or flight 9W609 to Leh, 50 minutes earlier. The airport hotel in Delhi somehow begins to bleed into the transit hotel in Singapore. The Australian dollars I was using on Monday have become American dollars and then Singapore dollars, losing a little in value with each exchange. Winter has become summer has become what feels like spring. Yet when I finally get to Ladakh, and look at all the snowcaps, the shockingly blue sky, the monasteries perched on hilltops all across the magical openness, I realize I've done something that I could not have dreamed of as a boy. Traveling by air, as has been said of democracy, is a terrible idea — until you think of all the other options.

Pico Iyer is the author, most recently, of Abandon, a novel, and Sun After Dark, a set of travel essays

• PICO IYER
• A week in the clouds offers a dizzyingly modern head trip