Learning how to be flexible
I was telling someone last night how I used to be so orderly about things – my house was cleaned from top to bottom (including the baseboards), my to do list always got checked off at the end of the day, and I could pretty much bank on knowing what I was going to be doing in two months and even went so far as to have a 5-year goal always at hand. Know where all that went – defenestration – that is right – out the window.
I blame my job for some of it – for teaching me to be spontaneous, for being able to throw aside and reassemble priorities at the drop of a hat, and I also blame life. It appeared to me after a long time that no matter how many times I tried to get my ducks in a row, they went quacking like mad in eight thousand directions and most of them never came back, or if they did, the whole lot of them were plucked or crazy. So much for ordering ducks. And life.
When on Monday, I left my house and very soon afterwards found that my 14-hour plane ride was now a rerouted 20-hour plane ride, and upon landing at a late hour that my luggage with all my belongings – notebooks, phone numbers, toiletries, clothes, shoes, books, IPOD were missing – and that I had to drive three hours to get to where I needed to be and was already a half day late, I said to myself, “Self I said, take a deep breath.”
Driving through the cornfields of Hungary, I realized that I am capable of handling a lot of things but most of all I am flexible, and have learned to respect the journey, because no matter what you plan, no matter how many times you cross the t’s and dot the i’s, life has a way of tossing you around like jet turbulence and leaving you just a little off center so that you are always learning anew how to be in the moment, enjoying yourself, despite the fact that you are not anywhere where you thought you were headed.