Remember a couple months ago when a six year-old girl threw a Coke on me? If you’re interested, click here to read that post. Well, on Tuesday I endured about 150 minutes of having a four year-old boy agitate me from the seat directly behind my window seat, and boy did I learn a lesson... sort of.
It all started with him reaching into my window and lowering the shade. His mother, seated in the aisle with a two year-old girl in between them, proceeded to ask the boy “Do you know that man? Then leave his window alone.” Actually, I didn’t even notice his hand poking around my seat until his mother started shouting at him. He then lowered his tray and started beating it like a set of drums – giving me a vibrating ride in my seat. The drum beating was followed by slamming the tray back into place and almost through my back, and then kicking the back of my seat. Fun times.
I never stay quiet in these scenarios. I’m usually not a jerk, but I’m pretty adamant about confronting people that are being rude. My philosophy is that I’ll either take it out on them or some innocent bystander later, so I might as well make my efforts constructive. Not this time. This time I kept quiet. This time I kept telling myself how hard of a time this lady was having. I kept telling myself that my words would do nothing but add pressure to her miserable flight. I felt like my patience and forgiveness would offer me a lesson in life. Well, it didn’t… and that was the lesson.
Unlike the Coke tossing incident a couple of months ago, this was truly a bad kid. I know, I know, judging a five year-old is unfair and could do a lot of damage. Well, life is unfair and I doubt he is reading this post, so I’m not doing any damage. This kid was bad and his mother, although dealing with a lot, was somewhat lazy and disruptive. I don’t need to provide details – you’ve seen this scenario a million times in different settings. I thought I would get struck with one of those epiphanies where I leave the plane arm in arm with the two kids, smiling and skipping through the concourse like Ebenezer Scrooge and Tiny Tim, making a lasting impression on them. Nope, it didn’t happen. In fact, as I was departing my row, the three of them rushed past me and the other five passengers in my row. No epiphany. No tingles through the body. No lesson in life … or was there?
Sometimes there isn’t a lesson. Some scenarios just offer the opportunity to do a nice thing and not get a good feeling in return. Some things happen in life without a reason. I think we beat ourselves up constantly to find a lesson in everything we do, or identify a reason that something happened. Sometimes we can’t… and that’s ok. A few years after Christopher Reeves’ accident, I heard him share a memory of feeling tremendous relief after realizing there isn’t a lesson or a reason for everything - at least not one that we can understand. Paraphrasing, he said: “Things happen. There’s not always a lesson to learn, and there’s not always a reason. Sometimes the conclusion is as simple as ‘I fell off a horse and now I’m paralyzed’. Once I stopped searching for the reason behind this accident, life became much easier.”
So what? I didn’t learn anything the other day. There was no noble reason for that five year-old to be kicking my seat. Who cares? It can be as simple as “a bad kid sat behind me on a plane and I didn’t want to embarrass his mom, so I kept quiet about his antics”. I think that’s enough… and that’s the lesson I took away from this incident.
