You have a limit. Everyone does. If you’re reasonably lucky, and keep your wits about you, you shouldn’t get pushed to there too often. But despite your best laid plans, your good karma, and your better instincts, once in a while life will place you in a situation where you have no control. In other words, sometimes your patience will be put to the test. When that happens, what do you do?

When your patience is tested, it’s easy to start losing things. Your cool, for instance. When it starts to go, you might find your temper replacing it. But anger is like a blunt hammer that rarely hits the nail on the head. You’re more likely to wind up with a sore thumb instead.

So what’s the most important thing to hang on to in tedious times of turmoil? Well, when life is working your last nerve, there’s nothing more important to hang on to than your sense of humor.

Challenging moments require a philosophical approach. And while the writings of Nietzsche, Kant, or Socrates may seem dour indeed, chances are they all would agree that humor is the touchstone to philosophy. Whether you believe in some omniscient deity or not, the fact that we even exist on this precarious planet somehow proves that we’re all players on the stage of a great cosmic joke.

There’s nothing like travel to put you face-to-face with the trials and tribulations of life. We just spent the last several days living this lesson firsthand. What’s normally a fairly routine journey from the Loire Valley in France to the Bay Area in California became an epic exercise in patience and fortitude.

Our first hint that things were going sideways was when boarding was pushed back a half an hour because ‘some of the crew members were running late’. From there, it only went downhill. We taxied to the tarmac only to find ourselves at a standstill due to a ‘technical issue’. We sat. We waited. We waited some more. After five and a half hours, we were told that the plane had been fixed, but the crew had ‘timed out’ so we would not be leaving at all that day.

Busses were sent to fetch us from the stranded plane and we got to arrive in Paris all over again, complete with customs, immigration, and baggage claim. Hotel and meal vouchers were dispensed to our group, and we were promised a special replacement flight the following morning. At this point, folks were still bearing up fairly well, and we began to get acquainted as we were all staying and having dinner at the Ibis Hotel at Charles de Gaulle.

We arrived back at the airport the next day with high hopes. Until they were dashed. Both our 10:30am replacement flight and the 9:15am daily had ‘technical problems’ and we were once again left high and dry with only vague promises that we would somehow depart that day. At this point, some of the folks were staring to lose it. Exasperation at the gate was reaching a crescendo and the front line folks from the airline were bearing the brunt of it.

Some folks gave up and bailed out by taking a train to Amsterdam or flying to London where other flights to SF could be had. One person plunked down several thousand euros for a first class seat on a different airline.  An angry man thought that yelling at the person behind the counter would help. A few had tears flowing. The more patient among us attempted jokes and got better acquainted.

Finally, around 5pm, we were told we could board, to which there was great applause. We were finally on our way, albeit with an extra stop in Newark, New Jersey to switch crews. At long last, we landed in San Francisco after midnight, some 36 hours later than expected. We said our goodbyes as we gathered our luggage, a shared experience under our belts.

Ordeal though it was, what I found most interesting was the different ways those in our cohort handled it. Those who resisted the hardest seemed the most worse for wear. Exhaustion is one thing, misery is another. Sometimes you can’t avoid getting worn out, but if you can stay light in your heart you might miss being miserable.

Dancing our way through the time zones to you, much love till next week!

M+

Mark Metz
Director of the Dance First Association
Publisher of Conscious Dancer Magazine