Airports are funny places. Not funny as in “ha-ha, what a relaxing afternoon,” but funny as in “how did I end up powerwalking past a sushi bar, a luggage store, a coffee shop, a gift shop, three people on speakerphone, and a restroom line long enough to qualify as a parade?” They are the places where travel begins and ends, yes, but they are also the places where travel gets sorted, shuffled, delayed, rerouted, and occasionally sent around its elbow to get to its ear.

In theory, an airport sounds simple. You start at Point A, you fly to Point B, and somebody hands you a tiny bag of peanuts in between. In practice, especially when you live near smaller airports, the whole experience can feel more like being poured into a giant funnel with more than one spout. You begin with a modest little airport where everyone looks vaguely local, and half the people seem to know where the good coffee is. Then suddenly you are deposited into a major hub airport that feels less like a travel facility and more like a city with runways attached.

For me, that hub is most often Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, better known to many weary travelers as ATL: the place where your short trip becomes a scavenger hunt with boarding passes. Atlanta is famous for being enormous and busy, and it is not busy by accident. It sits at the center of a hub-and-spoke system, where airlines bring passengers in from smaller cities, mix them together, and then send them back out toward their final destinations. It has grown into a very overwhelmingly congested place.

I understand the reasons, at least on paper. Airlines can fill more seats, serve more cities, and avoid flying half-empty planes all over the map. The hub model lets them connect a lot of places without offering a nonstop flight between every possible pair of towns. Fine. Sensible. Efficient. Economical. Gold star for the spreadsheet.

But then there is the passenger’s view, or mine. The passenger’s view is standing there with a carry-on, a stiff back, and a boarding time approaching with the attitude of a storm cloud. From where I stand, it can feel ridiculous to fly north to Atlanta just so I can be put through the maze of what seems like a million people to fly south and west to Pensacola. If I want to go from Jacksonville to Pensacola and avoid a six-hour drive, why must I first go in the opposite direction? Why must I take the scenic route through airspace I did not request? Why, in the name of all that is legroom, does aviation sometimes feel like a geography lesson written by a prankster?

I know the answer is probably a mixture of money, demand, aircraft availability, crew schedules, airport slots, fuel costs, gate space, and many other grown-up words designed to make my complaint sound less reasonable. I know some experts can explain exactly why the system works the way it does. I also know that none of those explanations make it feel easier to fly and get there. It feels more like being in a sprint event in the Olympics.

Major airports are marvels, truly. They are full of people from everywhere, speaking every kind of language, carrying every kind of bag, wearing every kind of shoe. There are families in matching vacation shirts, business travelers moving like they were born with rolling luggage attached to one hand, college students sleeping on backpacks, and folks like me trying to remember whether Concourse B is left or right or which way the numbers go.

They are small cities, these airports. They have restaurants, shops, lounges, moving sidewalks, escalators, trains, announcements, charging stations, and the occasional person who stops without warning in the middle of foot traffic to examine a boarding pass as if it contains buried treasure. Everything is moving. Everything is blinking. Everything is telling you to hurry, even when your flight is delayed.

And at my age, the hustle has changed. Once upon a time, I could hustle through an airport with a little bounce in my step. Now the hustle is more of a determined shuffle, and the bustle is panic wearing comfortable shoes. I do not run for flights anymore so much as negotiate aggressively with gravity. If I make the connection, I feel victorious. If I make it with time to spare, I feel as if I won the lottery.

Still, there is something almost beautiful about the chaos. For all my grumbling, airports connect us. They gather people who are going home, leaving home, visiting grandchildren, chasing jobs, taking vacations, attending funerals, starting over, or simply trying to get from here to there without getting lost along the way. Every person in that terminal has a reason for being there, and for a few minutes or a few hours, our reasons overlap.

Maybe that is what keeps me from being completely sour about the whole thing. Airports are inconvenient, overwhelming, and occasionally nonsensical from the traveler’s seat. But they are also proof that the world is still in motion. People are still going. People are still arriving. People are still hugging at baggage claim and waving from security lines and checking gate numbers with renewed hope after every delay announcement.

So yes, I will continue to question why I sometimes have to fly north to go west, or east to go south, or through Atlanta to reach a place that seems perfectly capable of existing without my detour. I will mutter about it, I will sigh at the gate, and I will keep an eye on the clock like it owes me money. But I will also board the plane, find my seat, and remind myself that even the crooked routes get us somewhere… Also, I try to just remember to breathe…