I write this from an airport. An apt space considering it sits between leaving and arriving. I am about to cross the Irish Sea, travelling from my island to the next. Over the past year, this journey has become routine: Dublin to London, London to Dublin. In that time, I’ve flown nearly 12,000 kilometres. On certain Thursdays, I sneak out of work a few minutes early and race to the quays for that overpriced airport bus that I still haven’t figured out how to pay for.
There’s the recommendation to arrive at least two hours before departure, followed by the sequential bustle: Security. Duty-free. Boarding gate. Boarding pass. Passport. Across the gangway to a randomly selected seat, and then the briefest of sleeps before hitting the clouds. Dark skies rolling in from Anglesey. A pause as I gather myself before the next leg. Onwards again: Croydon, Clapham Junction, the Windrush line. All of this culminates in that final stop.
On good days, I can complete this journey in just over five hours.
This has been my year of hopping between islands—not just this now familiar commute, but wider crossings too. In April, I took my students to the Aran Islands where I spent four days on a small rock in the Atlantic with my ragtag crew of art school kids mixing it up with the tiny local population. Sun, salty winds, limestone cliffs, and the strange freedom that comes from such a contained place. A few months later, I travelled to Corsica—a place famed for its unknown solitudes. I knew little of the granite island before I went and found a landscape, history, and culture that felt at once distant and distinct.
These trips have stayed with me—not simply for the places themselves, but for the effort it took to reach them. Trains, buses, taxis, connecting flights, and ferries. It isn’t the effort alone that makes them meaningful, but the crossings themselves do create space to anticipate, reflect, and arrive more fully.
Of course, there is a poetry to this framing—an easy rose-tinted optimism that smooths over the unromantic reality. This is especially true when long-distance love is involved. These days, my ultimate fantasy is to be able to teleport. I long for proximity over air miles, and I resent that every encounter must be planned weeks in advance. People curse the internet and dating apps for killing modern romance, but perhaps real modern love is found in the person willing to endure the Ryanair app just to spend two or three days with you.
As I dwell on my teleportation fantasy, I think about how it might be the ultimate fantasy of our time. In an era shaped by hyper-convenience and hyper-connection, what could be more desirable than moving from one place to another without the burden of time, distance, or effort? And yet, without crossings, something would no doubt be lost. Distance is never empty; it can be generative. It is the space where attention deepens and where things begin to take shape—what is the island without the water that surrounds it? Meaning requires time.
While this Year of Islands began with very real physical crossings, these journeys have felt all the more pronounced in a world where intellectual and creative crossings are so often bypassed for instant summaries, short-form content, and AI slop. We have accelerated our ability to make everything faster, closer, and more immediate, but, in doing so, it’s clear that we are at risk of losing the very spaces in which thought, attention, and meaning are formed. We want the arrival without the crossing, the answer without the question, the image without the act of making it. This is more than a philosophical observation: neuroscience shows that deliberate, effortful engagement—writing by hand, deep reading, sustained reflection—enhances brain connectivity, improves memory, and even reduces dementia risk. The crossings of thought, like the crossings of islands, are not wasted effort: they are the work that shapes understanding and meaning.
While today may mark the Spring Equinox, this romance—the reason I am writing this in an airport (now the air)—began, fittingly, on Imbolc, the Irish pagan festival that marks the midpoint between the Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox. If Spring feels like an arrival, then Imbolc is there to remind us of the significance of this distance in between. It is the space that exists between the no longer and the not yet. In the same way that long-distance love asks for patience, effort, and intention, so too do journeys across islands and journeys across thought.
It feels apt to end this reflection as I fly over some nameless city in the dark—trapped in a place of waiting and of pause. Perhaps this is what these crossings have offered me: not simply an arrival, but a way of noticing, again and again, this gift of the interval. No shortcuts, no workarounds. Just the slow work of meaning taking root. And then, almost without noticing, the other side.