05/04/2022
Off To London
In March we went across the pond for a week, come along with us!
Reality Check
It’s 6 am and the house is filled with lulled sounds.
The dryer in our garage hums away as it tosses our weary travel clothes around. The start of a new pepper tree in our backyard rustles in the humid breeze. Justice gently snores through his third alarm.
Meanwhile, I’m at the desk. My meeting with London and Prague has been rescheduled, someone’s got covid, despite the early change of plans I’m happy.
This month, I’ve had to be a little more open to change. On the 19th of March, we jumped on a plane to the UK, as we ventured off I promised myself to try to be adaptive. I have a bit of a tendency to get too caught up in the granular details of planning, as a result, life can sometimes slip past me.
So, while I could have been annoyed that the meeting got me out of bed a half-hour earlier than usual I decided to let it go. The only reason I agreed to the meeting being so early was that I legitimately thought daylight savings would have moved it forward (whoops). It was a harmless lesson.
Lightening my view on things has been a conscious effort for a long time. My first recollection of actively doing it was when I worked at my first job in my teens. I was training a younger cashier and I tripped, dropping my till and all the coins inside of it everywhere. I could feel the surge of horror rise inside of me, immediately feeling bright red and on fire.
“You could laugh at this,” a voice in my head whispered, “if you can laugh about it, it won’t be so bad.”
So I did, and things were okay.
Customers around me scrambled to help fish out $2 coins from underneath the displays and the aisles. My colleagues reassured me that it was a rite of passage and now I was “officially” part of the team. My panic subsided.
On the second leg of our journey to London, I could feel a softer version of that panic rise in my guts. This was my first ever business trip, I was about to meet colleagues that I’ve been working closely with every day for the last three months. The founder would be there, and the chairman of the board. Why fly me there? I’m just a writer…
Before I had the time to let that thought spiral any further a frantic lady stomping toward the bathroom slapped me across the face with the side of her coat.
I’d like to say that I was hit with a poetic reality check, but mostly I was just grouchy that someone could trudge by with so little self-awareness. Instead, I turned my attention back to The Stepford Wives and took a few deep breaths, wondering if I’d missed out on my chance for a plastic cup of pinot grigio.
Like magic, Justice squeezed my hand and whispered “this is going to be a great trip.” It’s times like these when our marital equilibrium balances out like a well weight distributed seesaw, that I’m endlessly grateful.
As we settled into our hotel in Covent Garden I made a tiny promise to myself to let go of any notion of this having to be a perfect trip. It was okay to fumble through this experience and fumble we did. But you know what? So did everyone else.
As we were coming to the end of the work portion of the trip we were all a bit worse for wear. Cursing all the gin and tonics from the night before, a department director sat next to me as we killed time before the next meeting. With his head hung low he reached his hand out to Justice and said, “I’m so sorry, I don’t think we met last night,” looking at me sheepishly. My husband graciously took his hand as I quietly mentioned, “actually, you did.”
The same horror I have felt a million times struck his face, he busted out a chuckle and replied “shocking, I’m so sorry,” quickly vowing “I’m never drinking again.” It was at that point in the trip that, I remembered we as people are all quite similar. We’re all insecure about something, we’re all prone to at least one mortifying life experience, and we’re all likely to fumble once in a while.
As we rushed to our final plane home with minutes to spare I found myself descaling some extremely high strung feelings. What was the worst that could happen if I missed this plane? I’d be stuck in New Jersey a little longer?
Then I heard a voice in my head say, “that would be the worst thing, leg it to that gate bitch!”
This month, I encourage you to see the lighter side where you can. It may mean cracking a joke to yourself or simply choosing to be humbled by your own inexperience. Either way, I suspect that it’s a good exercise for the soul.
Food For Thought
"Be still. The quieter you become, the more you can hear."
— Ram Dass
"First, you have to believe in yourself before others can believe in you."
— Mimi Ikonn
"Life is really just a lesson in finding balance between fear and courage."
— Cara E. Yar Khan