Flying by the seat of my pants

I think the most succinct description of my personality was provided by my sister in the first line of her toast at my wedding.

"I know our family knows this, but Jackie runs the show."

There is nothing more disconcerting to me than being out of control of my destiny. The feeling is more than simple anal retentiveness: I need to be in control of what I'm anal about and what I want to just let go, and but there's always a master plan to it. Life is a puzzle, and it's a matter of getting all the pieces to fit just right.

So it was a minor miracle that I stayed calm on my 11 hour sojourn back to JFK last night.

The details are too esoteric to get into -- the vagaries of FAA ground stops and takeoff slots are real yawners -- but to sum it up I spent 2 hours on the tarmac in Jacksonville before they would let us take off to go to Atlanta which would make me miss my connecting flight, the last of the night. By the grace of God my flight from Atlanta was delayed an hour, enough time to grab Pizza Hut and a Starbucks iced coffee.

Travel is inherently a stressful undertaking, but add 150 miserable people and a hot plane and things can get a little dicey. Yet I was able to take things in stride: talk with a friendly Atlanta-based Coke product manager, express my sympathies to a half-dozen Canadians that unexpectedly had their golf weekend extended by 2 days with no compensation, and play a few games of solitaire while contemplating my own fate. Maybe it was because I was lucky enough to have plenty of contingencies -- someone to stay with if I was stuck in Atlanta, 3 potential airports to fly into and a flexible enough job to not have to fret over being late to work. I was just going with the flow.

But there may be another answer to why I didn't blow a gasket last night. I'm beginning to realize the tighter grip I think I have on my fate, the more those plans go awry. I was going to be a high-flying political reporter before I met the love of my life. I never thought I was going to stay in Boston after school until an opportunity I couldn't pass up came to me. And I certainly never though John would get a job in New York.

This experience so far in New York is a great lesson how to function in the passenger seat. There are so many things every day out of my control, from the structure of my job to whether I get squeezed up against a particularly smelly person on the E train. And just as I begin to fall in love and get comfortable in the city, we could be off to wherever Uncle Sam calls us next.

It reminds me of a Ziggy cartoon I discovered in high school. Basically it's Ziggy traveling down this windy road and he says that instead of looking at the things that happen in life as a bunch of distractions and detours, maybe they're a part of the original path and we're wasting our energy complaining about them! For a silly Sunday cominc, I think there's a lot of wisdom in that.

I can't promise I'll give up the urge to want to be the ringmaster in certain parts of my life, much to the chagrin of John, but every once in a while I think I'll try to enjoy flying by the seat of my pants.