Awhile ago--really, quite awhile ago--Dr. Write posted the above sentence, which she found in a student paper. The student had made what s/he evidently felt was a superb and dramatic point, punctuated with this rhetorical opportunity, offered to the reader, to contemplate it. Thoughtful writer!
I often find occasion to use this sentence in my bloggery, usually with a wink. Because a writer as deft as I am wouldn't need to resort to so overstated a move, unless it was with irony. Right?
I am, however, finding that I myself may need to pause, so that I may reflect. Because I am finding myself making the kind of missteps and errors that suggest that someone around here isn't giving herself enough time to breathe. To double check. To pat her pockets, gather her wits, remember things.
To wit: yesterday, when I was attempting to check in online for my morning flight, Delta told me that I couldn't, not for a couple more hours. What? I queried the website. What?
This is when I discovered that my morning flight was in fact a night flight.
WHAT.
It turns out you can call Expedia. But you really can't ever speak to anyone, if my twenty-five minutes on hold are indicative at all. But this isn't about long waits on hold with a third party travel website. Nor is it about the twenty-five or so minutes I spent on hold with Delta. Okay, maybe it's a little bit about that. But mostly it's about how I bought a ticket online for a flight that was fully twelve hours later than I thought it was. And how I didn't realize this fact until twelve hours before my departure time. Which departure time, as it turned out, was imaginary.
I am on a flight now, evidence that I was able to rectify the situation, but not without some expense and a lot of anxiety.
This is the most freak-out-inducing example of my contemplation-starved state, though there are several others, more minor, that I could cite.
I bought the ticket in the middle of the night, when I couldn't sleep. In Scotland. So I was probably also jet-lagged. Perhaps not the ideal circumstances for buying a plane ticket? I don't know. All I'm saying--sensing, really--is this:
I need to just slow down for a minute, long enough to ask myself a question:
Shall I pause, perhaps, so that I may reflect?
Yes... by all means, take a pause!
ReplyDeleteI keep thinking these very thought. I hope your pause is restorative.
ReplyDeleteA few years ago, back when I was in the middle of several dozen crises, I booked myself on a flight to a work conference. At some point in time--it's all a blur really--I realized I had booked myself on a flight to northern Florida. The conference was in southern Florida.
ReplyDeleteSo I did what I considered to be the only reasonable thing. I booked a cruise that left from the middle of Florida and rented a car that we drove to the port, left parked in the parking lot for five days, and then drove back to the airport for our return flight home.
I'd never considered going on a cruise before that and may never again, but truly, it was an excellent pause.