On When Things Don't Go My Way
I’m currently in the middle of the situation I am about to relate, and so am hesitant to make any sweeping statements, especially about the future, but here goes nothing. My trip through Italy and France with my friends is drawing to a close this week. I’ve written previously about my conflicting feelings on the subject, but those aren’t what today’s entry is about. Today’s topic is more to with me recanting the travel mess we’ve been dealing with, and trying to string together a larger point at the end. In case it hasn’t been glaringly obvious, this is a common strategy I employ when sitting down to write here. Nevertheless, I usually find it helpful and somewhat cathartic, and hope that today will be no different.
It started with what was a very lovely evening out in Nice, where we were treated to some fancy drinks, and capped off the night by buying a pizza to eat by the beautiful beach. We were content to have the excitement of our night end there, but weren’t so lucky. I’ll explain. So far, our strategy of booking train tickets the night before our departure has worked like a charm, and we mistakenly expected the same to be true this time, failing to take into account our destination (and to a lesser extent, the time of year). You see, Paris is one of my favourite places in the world, and I absolutely relish every chance I get to visit. I feel a sense of at-homeness whenever I’m in France, but there’s a higher echelon of that feeling that only rears its gorgeous head when I’m in the City of Light.
Unfortunately, ‘I love Paris’ is hardly a novel thought, and such was what we realised that fateful night (last night) when we unsuspectingly opened our ticket-booking app. Every train was full. Every single one. We tried every possible connection, and laughed off some truly ludicrous app suggestions to spend hundreds of pounds on a day-long bus journey with three changes, before finally finding a route that worked. It involved a backtrack through Italy, then up to Paris. I was in an extremely unhappy mood for the entire hour of searching before we found that ticket. I found in my behaviour nothing short of anger. There wasn’t a lot of it, but it was concentrated, and it’s the flavour of anger I’ve been able to register as the one that defies any changes to the mood – most of all happiness. As you can imagine, it doesn’t make me very fun to be around.
It does have the upside, however, of putting me into a problem-solving mode if ever I have been capable of such a thing. It’s almost intoxicatingly effective, but has the probably necessary quality of being impossible to induce in myself. That boils down to a general inability to withhold information from myself for a surprise like that. Anyway, it’s now the next day, and plenty still has gone wrong. With that, I think I’m getting better at harnessing that problem-solving power, or at least letting that aspect take the reins and let the anger part sit it out a bit. I can honestly say I never knew this quality of mine existed before yesterday, and I’m nervously excited to see its potential.