8/19 & 8/20
So I have this theory that if I personally want something bad enough, somehow or someway, it will get ruined. I’m the 8th grader who got the prettiest dress she ever owned and then broke her foot two days before I got to wear it so that I had a matching ivory cast to go with the dress. I put way too much pressure on New Year’s Eves or Birthdays, which only sets them up to fall short of my expectations. I am the girl who will find the perfect white sweater and ruin it the first time she wears it to work by getting an ink mark on it. Overall, it’s taken a lot of major disappointments surrounding big events that has brought me to this conclusion but, ultimately it has caused me to become very hesitant to want things too much. Go figure that as I sat on the runway watching the rain fall from the plane that I began to get that overwhelming feeling once again in the pit of my stomach.
When I arrived at Philadelphia International Airport to embark on my latest adventure, I was excited, nervous and about a million other emotions but I was very cautious to make sure I had done everything right. I arrived 3 hours before my flight, found my gate, exchanged my cash to the correct currency, and made sure everything electronic was charged enough to get me to my first stop in LA. I even had time to spare. As I sat down in the waiting area at my gate, I looked out the window. To my left, outside the windows, the sun was shining as brightly as it had been all day. To my right, a slightly darker group of clouds were moving in my direction. Within what was probably an hour but seemed like minutes, the dark clouds engulfed the airport and the rain began to pour from above. My flight was delayed a half hour, then an hour. I was still ok because I had about three hours total to play with in order to still make my connection in Los Angeles. Finally we boarded the plane but I was down to an hour and a half of extra time. The rain continued to fall. The plane continued to sit. The hands on my watch continued to tick away my prefect plans. 2 hours later, I was airborne but ultimately I was screwed.
A million thoughts swirled through my head. How was I going to get to New Zealand? Missing my connection meant that I wouldn’t leave until the next night which would mean that I would miss meeting my group and have to figure out how to get our hotel on my own. Plus I would miss my first day of work. I sat in my seat staring out the window into the dark sky wishing for a miracle. As if I wasn’t already stressed about spending two weeks with complete strangers doing manual labor in a foreign country, now I was destined to have this trip start out in the worst possible way imaginable.
11:55pm. Five minutes after my connection to New Zealand was leaving, my flight from Philadelphia pulled into the gate at LAX Airport. Five minutes would be the reason I would miss two days worth of my trip. 5 minutes.
You know there are very few things that you can accomplish in 5 minutes. For example, it took me 10 minutes to find someone at midnight in the LAX airport to tell me where I had to go to find Quantas Airlines and about the same amount of time to take the bus from my current gate to the International portion of the airport. Normally 5 minutes is such a small practically insignificant amount of time but at this particular moment, it had the potential to inflict monumental damage on my life. Then my obsession with five minutes was replaced with an obsession over a new amount of time, 2 seconds. That’s exactly how long it took the man behind the counter at Quantas to tell me that my connecting flight had been delayed until 2:30am and the plane wasn’t even here yet.
As I sit here on the plane, well on my way to my final destination, it’s beginning to all make sense. If I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that things don’t always go exactly how you expect them to or how you plan them to but life is all about learning to maneuver your way through the twists and turns that come up. Sometimes it’s time or circumstances that seem to be against you and sometimes they surprise you and end up being on your side when you need them to be. Stuff happens. Life intervenes. We can let the unexpected disasters ruin our experiences or we can continue on just doing the best we can to manage the chaos that comes our way. I may be a little late but New Zealand here I come!
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