Dealing with life’s chaos

I woke up at 4:30 this morning for what was supposed to be a 7 a.m. flight from Savannah, Georgia, back to Washington, D.C. Seven hours later I’m still sitting at the airport with only a very general indication of when my flight might finally depart. There were mechanical problems with an exterior door on the plane that were discovered after everyone was on board (but before we took off) so we had to disembark following nearly an hour of just sitting. The maintenance staff evidently was unable to resolve the problem, so now we’re just waiting for a replacement aircraft to arrive from who knows where.

Every hour so far, the departure time has been bumped to another hour in the future; and when that hour arrives, it’s bumped out yet another hour still.

Normally these types of situations draw out a side of me that I’d prefer no one ever see — namely, unbridled rage. But for some surprising reason, I’m not nearly as angry right now as I might have guessed if you had told me 24 hours ago that I’d be spending almost my entire Saturday just languishing inside an airport terminal.

Why is that?

I think mostly it’s the recognition that I simply have no control over this situation. None whatsoever. Anyone who knows me even superficially probably isn’t surprised to hear that I chose to take a budget airline, which means there are only a couple flights per week to and from this airport, which means that simply changing my flight isn’t an option. Neither is booking a different one at this stage. Neither is driving; obviously I don’t have a car here, and even if I were to rent one, it would have to be a one-way rental that would cost far more time and money than it’d be worth.

So what else can I do? Leave the airport and hitch-hike across three states?

My sister texted me and asked if other people were angry. Surprisingly, there’s no sign of it. Everyone’s just sitting here minding their own business — napping, reading books, looking at their phones, typing on their laptops, telling their kids to behave. It’s as though all of us are of a similar mind on this situation: “Nothing we can do about it, so let’s just get through it.”

I’ve always thought that airports are probably among the loneliest places an average person will experience over the course of a lifetime. They’re places where a perpetually random collection of strangers are gathered together for the most fleeting of moments, each headed to their own destinations for their own purposes, for the most part not interacting with each other and certainly never to be in the same place again. The odds are overwhelming that the person you make small talk with (in this case, commiserate with) or sit next to on a flight is someone you’ll never cross paths with again, and the fact that you did even once is seemingly nothing more than a matter of chance.

In this sense, airports and air travel might be an analogy for life more generally. There’s an inexplicable chaos to the universe that all of us try on some level to defy or tame. But if you’re like me, you’re loath to admit that you have vanishingly little power over any of it.

You set three alarms to ensure you don’t oversleep and miss your flight — but then your flight ends up being more than eight hours late (at least as of the time of this writing), so it doesn’t matter anyway.

You triple-check one aspect of your work to ensure that it’s error-free but in the process you ignore another, where a mistake is later found.

You do your best to build and maintain relationships with people you’ve been close to over the years — but time, geographical distance, and circumstance inevitably takes its toll despite your efforts.

You successfully avoid one problem, only to be hit by another. You triumph, then you fail, then you repeat. You work hard to master one of your personal shortcomings, only to realize there’s an equally glaring one right behind it.

You make your plans with the wisdom you have, and then life throws random curveballs.

Paradoxically, moments like these almost make me feel more connected. In a very strange way, there’s a sense of shared humanity here. Some of the people in this airport terminal probably support political candidates and hold views that I would find reprehensible; others might have life experiences or aspirations that I can’t relate to in the slightest. But none of that matters here. Right now, everyone is just trying to live their lives and get wherever they’re going. They have no agenda apart from that, and at least in this particular case, they have no power that I don’t. People are being courteous to each other — and remarkably, to the airline staff — despite the circumstances. When someone says you should always try to assume the best about others, I suppose this is what is meant.

The week before I came down here for Thanksgiving, I snapped a picture of a pile of fiery leaves that had recently dropped off a tree near where I live. You could call it a mess — a collection of dying foliage that fell in a random and chaotic pattern onto the ground as a harbinger of the approaching winter. Or you could call it beautiful — a set of brilliantly colored leaves that together form a natural mosaic more striking than any camera can possibly capture, despite the apparent disorder of it all.

I won’t lie and say that this isn’t an incredibly frustrating experience. But if I have to deal with it — and I do — sometimes it’s better to try to find and focus on the beauty rather than the mess.