The Trials of Travel - Part 2

Well it's been a few days and now since the last entry. I promised at the end of that entry that 1) I would let you know how things turned out and 2) What positive lessons could be learned. So here goes...

1) My wife, daughter and mother were not able to book a flight back home as nothing was available for several days. They were able to get a flight on Jet Blue that got them to Portland, ME which is more than 1/2 way so they took that. My dad, after getting home at 1AM the night before, got up at 7:00 AM turned around and drove the 7 hrs back south to pick them up. Luckily we have relatives near Portland and my family and parents were able to stay there after Dad arrived so they could rest a bit before the trek back home. They all arrived safe and sound Thursday evening. Thank God.

Now, what can we take from this experience... that depends, as I talk about in my presentations all the time, on what we choose to focus on. There are a plethora of negative things that we could focus on from this trip: the lost bags, cold and cloudy weather, three people getting sick, the lack of help from the airline during any part of the ordeal, my wife being so ill on the way home that she couldn't fly etc etc etc but focusing on those things does us no good, and not only that, it ruins the vacation by overshadowing the good stuff that happened. So I'm choosing to focus on the good things like: riding with my wife on the Tower of Terror and watching her scream all the way; seeing the amazing and inspiring presentation at Sea World as the world's largest creatures jumped farther into the air than I ever thought possible; and one memory that will stay with me for a LONG time, the look on daughter's face when she met the Disney princesses.

All in all, we still had a great vacation. Was it a smooth one? No. Did it go as planned? No. Are we still going to make sure American Airlines knows how unhappy we are with them? Yep. But still, it was a good time, and the "adventures" we had actually have one big plus: they'll make sure that we'll never forget that week!

So what's the big lesson? We can only control so much in our lives. In fact, we can control much less than we'd like to think. So when circumstances go against you, don't stress, don't freak out, just do your best to "go with the flow". Things will turn around. They always do. Take comfort in the knowledge that while much is out of your control, there's one thing you can always do something about; how you handle adversity and what you choose to focus on. I'm choosing to focus on that image of my daughter's face.