We can't choose the weather.
(a lesson in control)
12 days ago, at 4:45 in the morning, I drove with my family to the airport in the dark. The six of us were headed west from South Carolina to Wyoming, and I had left my smartphone behind—in a drawer where it will stay for the rest of the summer.
I actually felt a kind of nervous excitement in the few days before I ditched the phone, like a foretaste of my freedom. It was the freedom of leaving town, too, and the freedom of summer. The more things I added to my suitcase, the more, paradoxically, I felt I was leaving behind. Getting farther from home—but closer to a new kind of life.
The first lesson, I suppose, was one in control. Or patience? Or humility.
Whatever it was, it was not a lesson in freedom.
We were in the check-in line in our small local airport at 5:25—groggy, ornery, spent from the seemingly endless recitals and concerts and celebrations packed into the last weeks of school. Lines at the usually empty kiosks were snaked around the dividers, but we had an hour to spare and security is fast and, even with 70 people ahead of us, we had not a moment’s worry that we wouldn’t make our 6:30 flight.
But one employee had called in sick, they said. Two of the vested women behind the counter were trainees and could only watch as the hopeful passengers shifted on their feet and checked the time and, eventually, began groaning in frustration. Groups were filtering through the only two baggage check stations in 5 and 10 minute increments.
We did the math. Short a miracle, we weren’t going to make it.
My husband caught my eye above the kids’ weary, wiggling heads. “I’m worried we might not even get there today.”
I raised my eyebrows in skepticism. “That sounds a little dramatic.” I was still holding out for that miracle—the one in which we made our original flight and our lunch reservation in Wyoming that afternoon, and the whole trip went according to schedule. I’d put too much time and money into the planning. Any other outcome was impossible.
At 6:10 a man stood on the baggage scales and announced to the crowd that they had closed our flight for checked bags, leaving at least 50 other passengers stranded in line alongside us. When we finally made our way up front, my husband negotiated with the attendant for later flights—none out of Greenville, none out of Atlanta, Charlotte, or Asheville. Or we could get as far as Dallas but not to Wyoming. Or to Salt Lake City but not to Jackson. If not Jackson then Bozeman? If not Bozeman then West Yellowstone? Idaho Falls?
Nothing.
Meanwhile I stood fifty feet away at the Delta counter, willing to forfeit every dime we’d spent on the first leg of our flights and get there on another airline. Our kids’ half-asleep bodies were slung across their suitcases. Nothing to Dallas, nothing to Jackson, nothing to Idaho Falls.
Nothing, it turned out, that entire day or the entire next day, not even if we split the kids and flew separately, took different flights, landed in different airports. The next available flight would put us there Saturday evening instead of Thursday at lunch, which is when my typed itinerary began, complete with all the addresses and phone numbers and reservations I’d need to navigate the trip without my iPhone.
Had it all gone smoothly, had we sailed through the airport, I might not have noticed the missing smartphone quite so much. As it was, I could not look up surrounding airports to tell the Delta agent, couldn’t see if our lodging was refundable before we rebooked, couldn’t even call a friend to cry because I hadn’t been able to transfer my contacts to the flip phone and who remembers phone numbers anymore?
4 hours after we’d arrived at the airport, we sat inside a breakfast diner down the road, gnawing rubbery bacon, stunned and exhausted into silence. Was this liminal space “vacation”? Should we take the kids late to school for the last half-day they had planned to miss? Should we unpack our suitcases for 2 days… or sit on them by the door, hands in laps?
I’d held it together for almost 4 hours, but just before we left the airport, when I’d heard 200 variations of the same bad news, I broke, sobbing into the uncharged, old, dead laptop I’d finally fished from a suitcase to google our options. My kids sat beside me, their eyes wide, having never seen me cry, or at least not like this. They quit complaining that they were hungry, bored, needed to pee, were tired of sitting in the same place for hours. The oldest rubbed my back. “It’s okay Mom. It’s not your fault.”
But it was.
The night before our flight, my husband and I had sat outside reading, our 7 suitcases and 4 carry-ons packed and zipped and waiting by the door for the final morning addition of toothbrushes.
“What are you thinking about the morning?” my husband asked, resting his book on the arm of his chair. “I think we should get there two hours early.”
“For real?” I scoffed at him over the top of my book. “When has it ever taken us more than 20 minutes to get to our gate?”
“I’m just saying, the airline recommends two hours for domestic flights now.”
“No way. It’s not TWO hours—that’s for international. No way am I getting up earlier than 4:15. That’s my early-ness limit.”
A couple of hours later he sent me a screen shot of the airline recommendation: “two hours” circled by him in red. “Just saying,” he said, with a winking emoji.
I never responded.
And then, after the bacon, we went home. And at home I needed to face the task of rescheduling and canceling what we could—without a smartphone. Or I needed to make my husband—the one who had wanted to get to the airport earlier, the person who had been right about everything—do it all.
Smartphone-“free” was no longer feeling like the right description for my experiment. No ma’am, I was not feeling free at that moment in time. What I actually (ironically) felt was constrained. I couldn’t do the things I needed to do. I couldn’t save the trip, put smiles back on everyone’s faces, keep the energy up until things were made right. I couldn’t do hardly anything—except cry so hard into my hands people walking past in the airport had stopped to stare.
Here is a thing I should have learned by now.
Never tell the universe you want to change your life.
Change doesn’t come easy. So you want to change your life, Lindsey? Okay. It’s going to get harder.
And maybe one day the harder becomes easier, but probably it won’t. If change is the goal, easier can’t be.
The goal, for any of this to make sense, has to be “better.” More meaningful, fuller, richer.
I am not, at this moment, feeling on board with better. While we sat in the airport, I kept thinking bitterly about the last thing I wrote here, “living your way into the answers blah-blah-blah,” the delay of instant gratification, a longing for slowness. Here it all was, delivered for me on a crap-platter with a side of humiliation and burned dollar bills for dessert.
And I did it all to myself: missed the flight, left the smartphone at home, came up with the whole stupid flip phone idea in the first place.
Not the first time I’ve had to check my high-minded idealism. It’s supposed to be a lesson I’ve learned by now: If you want things to be different, you had better brace yourself. Change knocks off the equilibrium, upsets the ecosystem. Change messes us up before it makes us better.
Hadn’t I wanted to feel the lack? Hadn’t I wanted to shatter the illusion that I can control the whole world from my smartphone?
Idiot.
We made it to Idaho, then Montana, then Wyoming. One kid threw up in her bed the night before our postponed flight, and another started puking halfway through the trip. We felt cooped up in our rustic cabin, we canceled a float trip down the Snake River due to rain, the kids ate nothing but kids’-menu mac and cheese for 9 days. It was supposed to be 9 slow, beautiful days to recover our wits as a family after a chaotic school year. It wasn’t perfect, not even close. I could not find my wits anywhere.
As much as I wanted to stomp my flimsy flip phone into a hundred plastic pieces the morning we were supposed to leave, the truth is, in the end, a smartphone wouldn’t have made one bit of difference in our plans. I would have felt more in control, maybe, but I wouldn’t have been more in control. I would have googled and tapped my way toward the illusion of power, but I still wouldn’t have had any (at least not since the moment I’d chosen to overrule my husband and wake up later).
Crying in the airport, I was drowned in guilt and shame. Would 30 minutes have made a difference? 20? How had I made such a huge mistake? It felt unbearable.
But I don’t think people have always thought this way. I think for all of human history, until the last maybe 20 years, interruptions (and grief and danger) have been the rule, not the exception. And I think this safe, predictable world we’ve created is an illusion that just makes our inevitable failings all the more painful.
Because we can’t stand to fail.
We can’t stand to wait.
We can’t stand to hurt.
Grit? Who needs grit when you have Google?
When my oldest daughter was four, she asked about our plans to meet friends at the park one afternoon. “It might rain,” I said, “so we might not be able to go.”
She looked at me, confused. “Why don’t you just change the weather on your phone?”
Reader. Every time in her whole life that I’d opened the weather app, my daughter had thought not that I was checking the weather, but that I was choosing the weather.
In this new world, her world, a world in which everything is tappable, my daughter thought I controlled the weather. That we could all choose the weather, whatever weather suited us. The entire cosmos customized to our desires.
A couple of years later, covid hit, and for a moment we remembered, all of us, that we weren’t in control. But by golly if we didn’t wrap our arms around control even tighter when we’d ditched the masks and the kids were in school and we thought we had it back, that we could once again master the universe.
The control I have of my own life is, I think, a big part of why I thought missing two days of our vacation was not inconvenient or surprising but impossible. Choosing the weather doesn’t seem that far off when you can choose (and have) everything else.
So. Change is slow. My idealism has withered, and I am not even a little bit happy about it, but I remain committed to the smartphone-“free” experiment.
The beginning of the experiment was not an exercise in freedom. It was a lesson in control—a reminder of just how little of it we have. How stupid we feel when we realize we are wrong.
Other lessons include: Don’t count your chickens.
Get to the airport early.
And do not fly American Airlines.
“Never tell the universe you want to change your life.” That made me chuckle.
Really enjoyed reading this, thanks!!
Lindsey, I never regret reading your posts, and this time I am going to copy a few of my favorite lines down in my commonplace book. Thank you for showing us your suffering. XOXO