I’m currently sitting at the bar at ITH, my local, very
small, six-terminal Ithaca, New York airport. It’s a gorgeous, recently renovated
airport, but still very intimate (as in tiny) and quite short-staffed. There’s
no one working at the bar, though I guarantee you if there were they’d be
making a killing right now. There is an adorable handwritten sign by a cooler
of drinks that says, “If no one is working, help yourself and please leave cash
by the register.” Oh, small town charm galore. I could sure use that canned
espresso shot right about now. If only I carried cash. I suppose the Mountain
Dew Zero from the vending machine that takes digital payment will have to do…
There’s only one flight leaving this airport this
afternoon and we’ve just learned we have a two-plus hour delay; many of us will
miss our connections at JFK. When the news came though, with the hard-to-understand
stained-voice gate employee shouting the announcement and, for some reason,
refusing to use the public address system, proclaiming to all of us within
semi-earshot, “JFK has low visibility and too many planes on the ground, so
they’ve asked us to stay grounded here in Ithaca until things clear up. They
estimate about a two-hour delay, but it could be more or less, depending.”
Okay. No big deal for me, as even though I have a tight
layover in JFK, I still don’t have to be at my conference in Vegas until
tomorrow night. I quickly got on my Delta app and super easily switched my
connecting flight to LAS and will get in just a few hours later tonight than
planned. Easy, breezy, beautiful. With that and the very long line that immediately
formed in front of my chair of people who don’t apparently use the app to take
care of situations like this, instead springing to life to yell at the poor
strained-voice gate agent, I moved from a seat by the gate to the bar, along
with a number of like-minded passengers, and set up a temporary office to kill
the time and get some work done. This unstaffed bar has now effectively been
tuned into a U-shaped conference table, with a dozen or so of us tech-savvy app
users (said with an eye roll, as I’m notoriously not tech savvy, though am
savvy enough to click the “delayed / rebook” button on the Delta app after I
got a text message from Delta telling me to do so) using it for workspace.
There’s one man here who, for the sake of this story, I’ll
affectionately call “Utah,” because as soon as they made the delay announcement
he shot up and stood right in front of my chair in the long-forming line to
talk to the sole gate agent…fuming. I garnered from his enraged partial sentences
that he’s going home to Salt Lake City (hence the nickname I’ve given him) and
has been in Ithaca on business. According to him, this delay is “completely
unacceptable” and his life is apparently ruined as a result. I kept trying to
tell him before I moved seats that he can easily just open up his phone and
switch his flight, as I’m sure JFK will have a dozen different options to reroute
him to SLC by a decent time this evening, but I couldn’t get a word in. I
guarantee you that Utah is the same type of person who waits in an exhaustively
long line at Starbucks to place his order, complaining the whole time, rather
than ordering on the app, getting the points, and picking up his latte five
minutes later to avoid the whole line situation.
Anyway, after a long, sputtering, spitting missive to me
and the others of us within his view and who were unfortunate enough to make
eye contact, Utah immediately started calling many different people on his cell
phone to complain about how awful his life is because of this “ridiculous”
delay. The poor man was just miserable. A total victim-mindset with seemingly
no capacity to take a beat, take a breath, and realize that it’s just a mere
bump in the road and that there are abundant options to make it turn out just
fine in the end; his life isn’t actually over because of fog in JFK.
That being said, I understand where Utah might be coming
from. I too get overwhelmed easily. Before I got on anti-anxiety medication, it
was an all-too-common occurrence for me to break down from panic attacks…always
at the worst times. Before I had my staff, I’d have to sometimes excuse myself
from helping a client or guest and go in the back to push through it, but there
were times when I wasn’t able to do that and I had to help someone while
shaking, crying, and exasperating. Panic/anxiety attacks are terrible. When I
had my team, things got much better because I had coworkers to take over for me
when I’d feel the spiral starting and my chest tightening, the lump coming to
my throat, and my breath becoming labored. They knew the signs and I could say,
“Just give me a minute,” excuse myself, and take some time in my office or the
bathroom to draw some deep breaths, collect my thoughts, and recompose. Now,
that being said, Utah is not having a panic attack. His issue is not medical,
but rather I’m confident that it’s drama and attention-seeking related.
But anyway, thanks to wonderful medicine, both
preventative and abortive, my anxiety is much more in-check now. I do still
occasionally get overwhelmed, but it’s much more rare and much easier to get
through. Stress is a big trigger for me, of course, but what usually gets me
worked up the most is just too much happening all at once and the feeling that
I can’t sort through, organize, and pigeonhole every input that’s being thrown
at me at once. I am a compulsive organizer, and if I can’t take notes fast enough
or make sense of things, it triggers me to completely freaking lose it.
The older I get and the more I work through life, the
more I realize that most situations just need time. It seems so much that comes
at us fast and maybe catches us off guard is not nearly as huge as it may seem
initially…if we just give it some time. New things often seem like giants.
That’s because they’re unfamiliar and usually are right up close. But with a
little distance and a little bit of time to take it all in, what may seem like
giants can easily become just regular old things that we can deal with easily.
Mountains can be made into molehills with time and distance.
In addition to panic attacks, I also get migraine
attacks…and have since I was a teenager. They too come on suddenly sometimes
and can be completely overwhelming, derailing my day and causing everything to
become muddled, fuzzy, and painful. They’re mountainous giants. The miracle of
modern medicine has also saved me from the brunt of my migraines that
traditionally would have floored me, but the pills I take to help with migraines
still take a little bit of time to kick in. During that time, I can’t function
very well (though, I must admit that I have become a wonderful actor over the
years and can fool many people—except my mom, who always can tell—by going
about my business while my head is pounding and my right eye feels like it’s
about to pop out of its socket). If I can, when I feel a migraine starting to
come on and take a pill to try to head it off, I’ll find a table and put my
head down, or, if I’m able, I’ll lie down for a few minutes and close my eyes.
This helps tremendously to reduce the stimulus and lets me focus on the
pressure points that relieve some of the pain. It just takes a little time.
Just giving things some time and some distance from
stimulus is a solution to so many of life’s problems, whether medical like a
panic or migraine attack, or other issues with stress, situations, new
information, overwhelm, and giants that seem to be all too common and come out
of nowhere. Giving things a minute makes those giants smaller and more
manageable. Though, it’s much easier said than done. It’s not in our nature to
step back and assess and wait a beat. We, as humans, are bandwagon beings and don’t
often naturally take the time and space we need to look again at the big
picture before jumping the gun.
As I’ve mentioned in a few posts lately, I’m a person of
faith. I call the power that I trust in “God,” and you may also use that term,
or perhaps you call it “The Universe,” “The Almighty,” “Allah,” Yahweh,” “The
Fates,” “Destiny,” “The Great Spirit,” or something else. Whatever you choose
to name that thing that’s bigger than any one of us, many people of faith will
agree and testify that that power often has a timeline that’s far different
than that of our own making. There’s a plan that I believe fully in and want to
be able to trust more. That plan will often present itself in chapters, and
many chapters and their plot twists can—and will—really knock us for a loop.
But, if we give it some time and turn a few more pages in faith, we’ll see why
things happened the way they did and how it set us up for something far
greater. The answer doesn’t always appear right away, but I believe
wholeheartedly—and have proved over and over—that the right doors will open and
close if we keep walking…and take our time, giving it a minute as we go. Don’t
force it.
One of my favorite quotes comes from Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. and it’s about faith. He said, “Take the first step in faith. You
don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” I’ve also
seen this quote paraphrased as, “Faith is taking a step without seeing the entire
staircase.” It’s beautiful. It’s powerful. And it’s so important.
I’ve proven this in my life. I’ve also jumped the gun
and gotten on the worst-thing-ever panic-infused bandwagon at times, and each
time have regretted it in hindsight. In selling my business recently, somehow
the timing just worked out as it should have. It wasn’t timing I had planned,
but it was right and the doors opened up and closed and led to it just as it
was meant to be. When I had cancer 11 years ago, the same thing happened. It
was a huge shock and blew me away and could easily have been the worst thing
ever, but truly in hindsight it worked out like it should have and I’ve experienced
so, so many silver linings since. And in my current project of fixing up and
selling my home in Ithaca in order to relocate to Delaware, I’m seeing so many
things open up and close and just work out—differently than I anticipated, but
that likely means better too. There are still lots of answers still pending,
but things are working out…and I know will continue to do so.
We’ve now landed in JFK and I’ve found my next gate. I
have an hour here, so I’ve opened up my laptop to post this blog and then
realized that Wi-Fi at JFK isn’t free like it is at ITH…and frugal Marty
doesn’t need to spend money for Wi-Fi immediately when this is obviously
something he can easily post later. So, I’m rereading this story and want to
give a little update, then hopefully I’ll post it all tonight when I’m in Vegas
and finally settled into my room. I used to have hotspot service on my phone to
keep business running when the internet would go down at my office, but now
that I’ve sold the business I also got rid of my hotspot. I kind of regret
that, but again, frugal Marty detests wasting money on things that aren’t either
necessary or special; airport Wi-Fi and phone hotspot service just-in-case don’t
seem like they qualify for either designation. But, I digress…
When we landed at JFK, the attendant announced that
anyone with a tight connection should deplane first. And that’s reasonable and
normal and pretty much standard practice. Utah shot up and got right to the
front of the line to deplane. Antsy and agitated in his sensible green plaid
shirt and dad jeans, he was wiggling and talking to anyone near him about how
he needed to get off the flight because this delay was, once again, outrageous
and he was very victimized by it. To most of the passengers’ frustration (but
secretly to my amusement, as I was impishly experiencing serious schadenfreude
watching Utah squirm at this point), the JFK crew couldn’t get the jet bridge
to attach to the plane. We waited for 30 minutes, Utah still standing and
whining and sputtering while most others had taken their seats again, before
the attendant announced that we would have to reposition because we weren’t
parked straight, and the jet bridge just wouldn’t attach. And not only would
people have to all sit down again, but they’d have to re-stow the luggage most
had already taken out of the overhead bins. Utah was furious; I was trying to
hide my smirk because, despite not being excited about my body-odored exit row
seatmate returning, I was completely bemused watching Utah turn everyone around
him off by his unreasonable grouchiness and attacks on everyone whose fault the
delay clearly wasn’t.
To Utah’s credit, it was a frustrating experience. But,
for me, the solution wasn’t complaining, but rather it was just waiting through
it and trusting it would be okay. It really wasn’t a huge deal. It was a
molehill, not a mountain. And now, after walking through JFK and experiencing
the huge breath of fresh air that it is to me—people of all shapes, sizes,
ethnicities, identities, creeds, family types, and so much more surrounding me
in this beautiful, eclectic, feels-like-home melting pot, peppered by the
looking-very-fly pilots and flight attendants in sharp, crisp uniforms walking
together to their next legs—I’m recharged and excited and feel like the world
makes sense again. A beat and a breath sometimes aren’t just exiting to the
bathroom to cry through a panic attack, but sometimes it’s getting back to a
place that feels like home or taking a trip to get a change of scenery. Both
are so helpful to reset our minds, refocus on the big picture, and remind us
that we’re a cog in a wheel in a beautiful system that’s just turning and
turning and giving us a ride we can truly enjoy if we just let ourselves.
I can’t express strongly enough how much time and
distance from a problem, situation, concern, or scene of stress can do to heal;
I can’t tell you enough how just giving things a minute will make things much,
much, much more manageable and sensible; I can’t advocate enough for the
importance of trusting in a plan bigger than what you see now and going forward
on the staircase even when you can’t see the top yet. What’s getting you
overwhelmed and causing you to make a scene today likely may not really be that
big of a deal. What if you put it aside for just a minute, step into another
room, take some deep breaths, refocus, rethink about what’s most important, and
then go back and see if you really need to freak out like you had started to
do, or if you can just give it some more time to become much less of a giant
and more of just another day’s challenge.
This, like most things I share, is advice to myself just
as much as it is to anyone else. I need it.
I need so often to just give it a minute.
…
The above essay was written on March 6, 2024, however due to
aforementioned hotspot issues and then the non-stopness of the back-to-back
conferences I attended in Vegas, I didn’t get it posted until now. So, just
ignore the date inconsistencies as a result, please. :)
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