A couple of days ago, I used this space to share about our daughter's minor travails in getting back from New York City. She happily reported that no one offered her picante sauce while there, but then again, that's more of a GenX joke that you might not get.
Still, we left her unresolved, waiting for an answer to her weather delayed flight. It was a good time to reflect on being powerless and the reality that our lives are often filled with powerless moments and it's more about how well we navigate them than eliminating them. After all, if you are always "in control" then you are rarely out of your normal space. (That's not to minimize that you often do have at least the "control" of backing out of a situation. That's not exactly "in control" because you can't change anything from it.)
Now, first, let's resolve the real-life situation: after a 3-hour delay in NYC, her flight arrived in Atlanta just as her flight from Atlanta to Little Rock took off. As in, one plane descending, one plane rotating off the tarmac on a different runway. Which led to spending the night in the Atlanta airport, flying back to Little Rock first thing the *next* morning, where we picked her up from the airport and took her home so she could sleep.
There are perhaps life lessons here about things God protected her from that she'll never know about, but I think there's also a valuable lesson here that sometimes, life just goes wrong.
And that's it. There's no lesson. There was no "oh, if you had made your first flight, this horrible thing would have happened." (Although that is, at times, true.)
Life just is not always easy. And frustration comes from it. But you're well-served if you learn to only let the real frustrations bug you: sleeping in an airport chair is definitely frustrating! Don't add the frustration and emotional wreckage of being mad that it wasn't easy.
Some basic tips for this:
1. Be ready for things to go haywire at various times. It's going to happen eventually, anyway.
2. Be aware of the people that will help you as life takes weird turns. In this specific case, our daughter realized she needed help with sorting out getting home from the airport, since she was not coming when her roommate could pick her up. Oh, and then realized it needed to be someone with a key to her apartment, since it wasn't her roommate coming to pick her up!
3. Be calm when needed. Sometimes, you have to focus. Have some calm ready.
4. Be emotional when necessary. She called at 1 AM with tears. That's fine. I've melted down in airport in a chaos moment before, too...
5. Be available to others in their chaos. Without snark. Without criticism. Just be willing to help.
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