Notes on expectations, and proving them right
“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”
The other day, I had a flight delay on a trip that already felt like it was going to be too short.
To be perfectly honest, for as much travel as I do, I’m not very good at handling the inevitable and uncontrollable issues that constantly arise in the process of travel. Things like flight delays, bad traffic, weather cancellations–things that are very much out of my control–can spark an almost primal response and put me on the border of a panic attack. Logically, I know that both I cannot control everything and also that my unreasonable emotional response isn’t going to change anything (other than cause my body a great deal of stress)–but I’m still not always great at accepting these things gracefully.
And so, when my flight was delayed, I immediately went into a spiral of this one thing has gone wrong, and now here are all of the other things that will go wrong. (To be fair, I was also dealing with a few technical difficulties that were out of my control that surely compounded my stress.) I texted my best friend: “Everything is going wrong, this weekend is going to be ruined.” She wrote back that sure, today might be ruined–or at the very least, sure, you might not be able to do everything you want to do today. But to be careful about taking that attitude into the weekend: because if I thought that the weekend was going to suck, then it would.
She was right. If I brought this downer attitude with me off the plane, I was going to waste not only a lot of energy but I was also going to prove myself right. I had to take a deep breath and leave behind the tears and the negative assumptions.
And so: the weekend ended up being incredibly fun. We packed a lot–activities, good food, catching up–into not a lot of time. Although my flight was delayed, traffic from the airport to the city was surprisingly light and I breezed through in a Lyft in half the time I thought it would take. The weather cooperated beautifully.
When I look back at how I reacted on the plane, I’m embarrassed. And I feel that way a lot in these situations! What feels overwhelming and joy-crushing at the time almost always seems like a minor roadblock in hindsight. They’re not just first-world problems, they can barely even be defined as “problems.”
The Henry Ford quote at the top is one of my favorites. I mostly think about it in terms of work: accepting challenges and turning them into achievements. But this weekend made me realize that it’s the same thing when it comes to managing my reactions and my emotions: if I let myself spiral, I’m going to spiral. But if I can realize the scope of the problem and focus my energy instead on finding a solution–or at the very least, understanding that I might as well just put that extra time into reading my book because there’s nothing else I can do about it–I can save myself a lot of tears and stress and find some peace instead.
