I’m sitting in an airport right now with a very high heart rate, because I just missed my connecting flight. It wasn’t my fault (my first flight was delayed, which made the second one impossible), but that doesn’t do much for the knot in my chest.
I’m stressed, I’m thinking about the worst possible outcome from me being stuck in Atlanta (Missing my speaking engagement tonight, being blacklisted and never invited to present again, my reputation as a reliable person being forever tarnished, etc), and I’m also beating myself up because I know better than this and I should just calm down. The internal battle over “why is Andy just not relaxing like he knows he should” has got me thinking about a book I read recently.
The book is about a woman who is married to a doctor and cheats on him with a vain, superficial, married guy (he’s a rising politician, if you can believe it). The husband finds out, and his idea of revenge is to take her to a rural village in the middle of a cholera outbreak. It’s a weird, terrible, borderline murder-suicide plan, and he volunteers them both for it. Over the course of the story she changes. She watches people take care of each other in the worst possible conditions, and she realizes that being superficial is a bad way to live and that she wants to be a better person. Her husband refuses to forgive her anyway. Then he catches cholera and dies, the epidemic ends, and the village politely tells her they don’t really need her around anymore, so she goes home.
You would expect this is where she lives happily ever after with the lessons she’s learned about being a good person, but she does not. She gets back and is immediately seduced by the same skeevy, married guy! The book ends with her feeling bad about herself, vowing to do better, and planning to raise her child (who is also the skeevy guy’s) in a better way. When I finished it, I honestly said out loud, “What the hell was that?”
It took me a while to figure out the point. The book would not have been realistic if she’d gone to that village, had her epiphany about compassion and service, and come home permanently fixed. People don’t work like that. Knowing the right thing to do and actually doing it, every day, in the face of chaos, stress, and temptation, are two very different things. We’re human beings with flaws that are built into us, and the work is to keep trying to do better and to keep wrestling with those flaws, probably for the rest of our lives.
That’s what I’m thinking about today. I know I’m going to be fine, and I know this too shall pass. In the grand scheme of things, a missed flight is not the end of the world. I’m also having real emotions about it, and getting frustrated with people around me, and I wish I weren’t. I’d like to be the calm, philosophical guy who shrugs and orders a (decaf) coffee. Right now, I’m not that guy.
So this is for anyone out there who is feeling a lot about something and is also telling themselves they shouldn’t. You know you should be zen, relaxed, calm, and above it all, and you aren’t, and now you feel bad about that, too. I see you. This whole being a human being thing is really, really hard, and the people who look like they’ve mastered it are mostly just wrestling in quieter places.
