All better now
Photo credit: Marianne Møllmann
I got up at the crack of dawn this morning to catch a flight. Except the flight had been cancelled.
I was lucky that I looked at my phone at all before leaving for the airport. I recently decided to delay the moment in which I allow technology to invade my headspace, and so usually have my first cup of coffee without knowing what fresh hell awaits in the news. The side-effect is I also don’t see messages or emails for a while either.
But this morning I thought I should take a look, just in case. Lucky I did. A 1am text message laconically announced that my 7am flight was cancelled. After a moment of panic and considering whether an all-day bus might be the best option, I got rebooked on a different flight tonight. Meetings and get-togethers had to be shifted, onward travel replanned, and parcel pick-ups delegated to another day. Done and done.
The point here is not the logistical shuffle. Life is full of them, many so routine so as to become almost subconscious - swerving to avoid a pothole, shifting to a bus when the train is running late, childcare cancelled, rain-checks etc etc.
The point is that when life is filled to the brink, logistical shuffles can become almost unbearably overwhelming. All the carefully laid plans disrupted. Studiously placed Tetris blocks of time that have to be reconsidered and redistributed over a period that seems to shrink every time I take a look.
That is the point. Not the overwhelm itself, but its inherent message: there is always another way. The overly bloated schedule I have operated with over the past year has come to a screeching halt, and it is perfectly OK. The realisation I am sitting with is that I had lost the ability to see that and halt it myself.
It’s not that I hadn’t seen the telltale signs of budding burn-out: after all I have been here before. It is also not as if I hadn’t started to institute the building blocks of what I know to be the solution for me. Unstructured time. Time to sit in silence with my God. Time to place my feet in the grass and talk to the ants and grasshoppers that crawl into my shoes. Time to run and swim and sew and watch the clouds pass across the sky.
But I needed a cancelled flight to tell me, again, that those are the things I can control. The present, and how I engage with it. The rest is noise or logistics or the weather. The rest just is.
