Disaster?

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(Rudbeckia–Black-Eyed Susan–after the petals are gone,
November 2009 in my garden)

I have been on a lot of airplanes this fall. Some trips went smoothly. Many, however, did not. One flight had two delays and a change of “equipment” (they had to find us a different plane). (I was so bored I went back through security just to see if I could get strip searched.)
So. Finally, we arrive in Seattle, quite late, but in one piece. A man on his cell phone, shouts, “What an f_ing disaster! It was the worst!” He spits the words as we squeeze by the paraplegic in the wheelchair. “F_ing two hours late, and I didn’t even get my upgrade!”
Not that I didn’t think those exact same thoughts.
I did. I really did.
But hearing him, made me laugh outloud.
And pause.
Disaster? As in Rwanda disaster? As in Katrina disaster?
“Listen pal, you just traveled across the entire country in the sky, sitting in a metal tube, watching movies, and you arrived in time to have dinner with your family, assuming you are not pissed off at them too.”
What is it with our need to assign a superlative to every negative experience?
New Rule: Before you want to tell everyone at gate D7 about how disastrous your life is, on your $300 iPhone, to someone still willing to listen to you, let me buy you a beer and give you a chill pill. We’ll write down your world-weariness and disenchantment on a bar napkin, and save the noise pollution.
Yes. Flights go haywire. And frustration boils over. We have bad days. Sometimes, really bad days. I am the last guy who would advocate walking around 24-7 with a silly grin pasted to our face. But we do need to rethink our words. Because this week I read two fine books about amazing people who survived real disasters. And about the hope that resides in some kernel, deep down inside every one of us. Tracy Kidder’s Strength in What Remains, the unlikely story about Deo, a young medical student who fled genocidal civil war in Burundi in 1994.
And Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, about the extraordinary communities that arise in disaster.
But if you do need to complain, that’s okay. I’ll be glad to buy the beer, and we’ll share the bar napkin.

Some of the stuff I learned was, be willing to know that even when you think you know for sure, always leave room for uncertainty. And someone who always agrees with you is not necessarily your friend. You can always learn something good in a hard time, if you survive it. And there is really no mathematical formula you can follow to achieve what you want. Deogratias (Strength in What Remains)