Every single airplane was grounded by the storms surrounding the Dallas-Fort Worth airport.
I wasn’t worried.
Kim and I had a three-hour layover in Detroit. Plenty of cushion!
We sat on the plane for over an hour before the storm passed. Then the pilot came on to tell us that our fuel tanks were too hot — is that bad? That sounds bad… — and that we had to return to the gate to have them checked.
We deplaned, re-boarded, and eventually made it to Detroit.
Four hours late.
The rest of the night became a cavalcade of crushed hopes.
At least we’ve been automatically re-booked…for a flight the next afternoon.
At least the airline will cover our hotel…if we wait behind 137 people in the virtual customer service queue.
At least we could smother our sorrows with Detroit-style pizza…except the restaurant had closed ten minutes earlier.
At least McDonald’s had frozen Cokes…except the machine was broken.
Good thing we’d checked our carry-on to avoid dragging it through the airport. Unfortunately, that also meant no toiletries and no clean clothes.
Near midnight, we finally reached the Marriott, only to discover that the “last room” we’d booked might not actually exist. After fifteen painful minutes of watching two exhausted employees stare blankly and motionlessly at their computers as though decoding an alien language, we were finally handed two toothbrushes that I swear each only had a single row of bristles and, most importantly, a room key.
To a room with a broken air conditioner blowing lukewarm air at full blast.
Congratulations, level Hell has been unlocked.
Ah, the glamour of travel.
The night before, after my speech, one attendee paid me perhaps the greatest compliment I’ve ever received by comparing me to G.K. Chesterton. I thanked him and shared one of my favorite Chesterton quotes:
“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”
Those words echoed in my ears as we endured our day from hell. Because that’s really all it was.
Inconvenient.
We saw parents trying to entertain exhausted toddlers. A couple from India who had already been traveling for twenty hours missed their flight home. We were fortunate that our delay happened after my speaking engagement rather than before. Nothing to reschedule and no panic required.
But perspective is hard when you’re busy collecting tiny paper cuts of disappointment.
Pithy quotes make wisdom sound easy. It isn’t.
But it is a choice.
It took every ounce of gumption to reframe our inconvenience as an adventure.
It didn’t help that the hotel breakfast was picked over.
But our quest for deodorant ended in victory when we found the last overpriced stick on the shelf at a nearby gas station. We celebrated with slightly stale Krispy Kreme donuts and a few ridiculous selfies that lifted our spirits. Who knew donuts and deodorant could be so good for the soul?
Instead of hanging out in our lukewarm hotel room, Kim and I spent the morning in the cool air conditioning of a nearby smoothie shop.
A smoothie never tasted so good.
While we were discussing a book we’d been reading, a young woman asked to borrow our phone charger. She turned out to be an artist who also worked as a chef. She showed us her work, and it was terrific. I could tell she was a hard worker and had a ton of potential. I signed a copy of The Penguin Who Flew from my bag and gave it to her as we walked out the door.
Who knows? Maybe the whole reason for the delay was so we’d meet her. Maybe the encouragement we offered was exactly what she needed.
Meanwhile, the book Kim and I were discussing over smoothies sparked the idea for The Collector Club, which just launched with over 100 collectors.
God probably could have accomplished all of these things more efficiently. Perhaps we’d have arrived at the same ideas anyway. Or maybe there are dozens of reasons for the delay that have yet to be revealed, or my bird brain will never understand.
At the very least, it gave me something to write about.
I’ve said many times that we can’t always control what happens to us, but we can always choose our response.
Inconvenience or adventure?
A simple choice, but not an easy one.
It’s a choice that changes everything.
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