What we lose if we stop travelling on business

{"text":[[{"start":11.8,"text":"In his poem Ithaka, Constantine Cavafy describes “with what pleasure, what joy, you enter harbours you’re seeing for the first time”. "},{"start":19.117,"text":"As I often arrive by plane, harbours are not the first things I see. "}],[{"start":24.08,"text":"But when I do see water shortly after landing, it never fails to exhilarate: the vaporetto into Venice, the evening stroll along Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, Seattle’s waterside Pike Place Market. "},{"start":35.134,"text":"A few years back, as I walked in brilliant sunlight across the white-painted Cavenagh Bridge over the Singapore River, I said to myself: you were lucky to have done all this (and lucky, too, to be going back to a cloudier country where I can say what I like). "},{"start":47.989,"text":"Even when the first sight is the airport metro station or a rainy street, I’m lifted by the thought of being somewhere different. "}],[{"start":54.97,"text":"With the coronavirus pandemic, business travel has largely stopped. "},{"start":59.373999999999995,"text":"Some think it should never restart; we can talk on Zoom. "},{"start":62.667,"text":"Most agree that when it does restart, there will be less of it. "},{"start":65.89699999999999,"text":"Companies will want to save money; flying damages the environment. "},{"start":69.589,"text":"I don’t contest either. "},{"start":71.169,"text":"But if we stop visiting each other, we will, in important ways, be diminished. "}],[{"start":76.78999999999999,"text":"Travel not only broadens the mind, it deepens understanding — business travel most of all. "},{"start":82.207,"text":"Interactions on a work trip, unlike those on holiday, are not just with those serving you. "},{"start":86.92399999999999,"text":"You deal with people as equals. "},{"start":88.954,"text":"You go into their workplaces, you talk about what they are making and doing, you enter their lives. "},{"start":93.90899999999999,"text":"I have been into aircraft factories in Seattle and Toulouse, a financial services company in Bogotá, luxury watchmaking workshops in Geneva. "}],[{"start":null,"text":"

Even other countries’ offices have their fascinations: how people greet you, how they are with each other, what pictures they have on the walls

"}],[{"start":102.77999999999999,"text":"Each told me something. "},{"start":104.68399999999998,"text":"The intense competition between Boeing and Airbus (I once saw a banner on a Boeing factory wall that said “Refuse Toulouse”) demonstrated how these two rivals spurred each other on to greater technical ingenuity, and the dangers of cutting corners in doing it. "},{"start":117.51399999999998,"text":"In Bogotá, people talked, privately, about the relief and fragility of peace. "},{"start":122.13199999999999,"text":"Having been scornful of luxury watches costing tens of thousands of dollars when a phone tells the time more precisely, I marvelled, watching the watchmakers, at their pride in generations of craftsmanship. "},{"start":132.612,"text":"Even other countries’ offices have their fascinations: how people greet you, how they are with each other, what pictures they have on the walls. "}],[{"start":140.87,"text":"Cavafy was born into Alexandria’s Greek community to parents from Constantinople. "},{"start":145.874,"text":"He spent his teenage years in England, where his family had a business, and he spoke Greek with an English accent. "},{"start":151.654,"text":"He stood, as the novelist EM Forster wrote, “at a slight angle to the universe”. "},{"start":156.247,"text":"Travelling, if we are prepared to enter other people’s lives, shifts our angle too. "},{"start":161.052,"text":"Far away from home or, like Cavafy, from the several homes we have had, travelling is a chance to see where we come from through others’ eyes. "},{"start":168.56900000000002,"text":"What seems so important at home often shrinks when we’re somewhere else. "}],[{"start":172.75,"text":"Even those who say they don’t miss business travel and reckon it over-rated, boring and tiring, will accept, I hope, that they learnt from it. "},{"start":180.192,"text":"The destination — Ithaka for Cavafy (as in Homer’s Odyssey) — isn’t the only point. "},{"start":184.922,"text":"Cavafy ended his poem: “If you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. "},{"start":189.402,"text":"Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean. ”"}],[{"start":195.5,"text":"What wisdom and experience I have gained, I will leave you to judge, because this part of my journey is over. "},{"start":201.379,"text":"After three years of writing this column and 34 on the FT, I’m off to explore other things. "},{"start":206.547,"text":"I will appear in the FT occasionally in the future but, until then, thanks for your company. "}],[{"start":211.2,"text":""}]],"url":"https://creatives.ftacademy.cn/album/001091904-1616565013.mp3"}