Reset and Laugh

Since we are knee-deep in politics these days, considering that the contested, or more accurately detested, presidential election is just around the corner, I think we all need to take a breath, reset, and laugh just a bit more.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I were heading to Boston and then onto New Hampshire for a long weekend with family. This was my first airplane trip in nearly a year due to my retirement and some subsequent health challenges. I know that makes me sound old but make no mistake, I’m still very active. In fact, I’ve recently engaged in a variety of athletic activities. I run to the bathroom frequently. I workout the kinks in my back several times a day. And my head swims every time I stand up too quickly. So, don’t accuse me of being old—not just yet.

Anyway, we arrived at the airport at 3:00 pm, about two hours before our flight was scheduled to board. Luckily, I maintained my membership in the United Club Lounge, a holdover from years of traveling, because it’s nice to have access to a quiet space with free food and beverages. And while there is a membership fee, I found that it actually saved me money over paying the highly inflated airport food prices. So, we hung out in the lounge away from the hustle and bustle of thousands of travelers packed into the main concourse.

Around 4:30 pm,? we noticed a storm rolling in. We had not monitored the weather so this caught us off guard. At that moment, we got an alert telling us that our flight was now delayed by thirty minutes. So, we checked the weather app on our phones. The radar map showed that the storm system passing through our area was not only huge, it was hardly moving. The time lapse prediction indicated that the system might still be hovering over us several months later. That caused us some concern, thinking we might not get to New Hampshire as expected.

I’m a seasoned traveler and I know that when there is a potential weather delay, it’s important to look for other options. Typically, this means switching to another flight or canceling the flight altogether and driving to the destination. Neither option worked well in this particular situation. For one, it was Labor Day weekend. There were no other flights unless we wanted to land in New Hampshire the day after we were supposed to come home. And driving would take ten hours which neither of us was particularly fond of considering.

So, figuring we could do nothing more than wait, we needed to do a mental reset. Rather than worrying about all of the potential problems that could occur over the next few hours, we needed to just relax and lean into the situation.

Please note that I am fully aware that getting trapped in the club lounge at a major airport is not a life or death situation. Having just been through major cancer surgery and radiation treatments, I get it. But here’s the thing: The reset principle works regardless of what the situation is. We just have to be diligent. Let me explain.

Resetting our minds means not letting the little voices control our emotions. The little voices in our heads love to annoy us. At the airport, they said things like, “You will never get to New Hampshire and your family will hate you for not showing up.” Or, “The plane may try to fly anyway and lightening will take out both engines requiring the plane to coast the rest of the way thus delaying the trip even more.” Or perhaps, “If we have to stay in the club lounge too long, they might run out of cookies.”

Truth is, none of us know what will happen today, tomorrow, or even a few minutes from now. It’s all unfolding in front of us and we just need to buckle down and enjoy the ride—because it’s the only ride we have.

So, every time my wife or I suggested that things might get worse, we just reminded ourselves to reset our minds by saying, “This is where we are right now and we will be fine.”

After a proper reset, I find that the next best option is to look for funny things. There are so many ridiculous things happening all around us all the time. We just need to open our eyes and look.

For instance, at the table next to us, there was a family with a mother and five kids. That alone made me exhausted. The two oldest boys looked like they were in high school and had never been offered access to free, unlimited food. They piled soft tacos on their plates and ate them as if the storm might prevent them from ever eating again. Food was dripping off their faces and their level of concentration was that of a master chess champion. I could not take my eyes off of them. It entertained me for a good twenty minutes.

Later, after several hundred more delays, the club lounge closed and we were forced to move to the gate area with the common folk. As we were leaving, I overheard a staff member suggesting that those “two teenage boys had depleted most of the food and soft drinks.” Funny.

Because of the lack of seating in the gate area, Wendy and I grabbed two of the airport wheelchairs and parked ourselves in them for the duration of our wait. While, technically, we were probably not supposed to use the wheelchairs, I convinced myself that I had recently gone through cancer treatment. So, if anyone said anything to us, I was prepared to tell them that they could “try and pry those wheelchairs from our cold dead hands.” In hindsight, perhaps I was a bit on edge.

Anyway, we sat in the crowded boarding area right next to the ticket counter and just watched people, reset our thoughts, and looked for humor. We were not disappointed. Shortly after we got there, a young woman came up to the agent, with tears in her eyes, and asked the agent when the flight would leave because, she “must get to Boston tonight”. It was not the most creative plea. If she had said she was scheduled to get a liver transplant that evening or that her government ID expired at midnight, perhaps she would have generated more empathy. Instead, the agent looked at her, with a blank expression on her face, implying that the young woman’s situation was no different than anyone else’s. However, the agent did offer to rebook the young woman on a flight at 10:00 pm the following evening. The woman cried harder and said that was out of the question. I thought about telling her to try the liver transplant ploy but decided to just let the situation play out.

The agent offered to put the woman on standby for an earlier flight but told her that there were already a lot of people on that list. The young woman said that wouldn’t work either and decided to call her mother to discuss her options. In the meantime, she never left the ticket counter even though there were a dozen people behind her waiting to discuss their own liver transplants. Now this might not seem funny to you. You might even consider the whole thing tragic. I mean, laughing at someone else’s misfortune is not “good clean fun.” That being said, Mel Brooks once said, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” So, there’s that.

Well, while the young woman talked to her mother, the agent continued to answer questions and tell the frustrated travelers that there was not much she could do. Then, the young woman ended her call and said, “I’d like to take the flight tomorrow night.” And of course, we all know what happened next. The agent looked at her computer and said, “There is no longer any availability on that flight.”

The young woman began yelling at the agent for giving away her seat while the agent tried to explain that the seat was taken by someone else and she had nothing to do with it. After a painful few minutes of back-and-forth accusations, the young woman agreed to be put on the standby list. But before she left the counter, she said to the agent, “If this current flight does actually leave tonight, could you change my seat. I don’t want to sit in that particular row.”

If the looks on the other passengers’ faces were daggers, this young woman would need more than a liver transplant. Wendy and I just watched it all play out as if it was a Netflix docuseries about a travelers acting badly.

So, what’s the point, other than a simple smile-worthy tale?

I suspect that whenever adversity sneaks up on you, if you can purposefully reset your thinking and then look for the humor that occurs simultaneously, the adversity will not be so intense. Granted, we’ll still have to deal with situation but the experience should be smoother no matter how difficult it is.

(By the way, our flight finally departed at 3:00 a.m., a mere twelve hours since we had arrived at the airport. We became professional resetting humor seekers that night!)