It’s All Good

By Namaste Publishing Staff

A purser, a friend of mine, was standing at the door greeting people aboard the plane, when a man approached, anger oozing from his pores.

Walking so briskly that he bumped into the purser, just about knocking her down in the jetway, he exclaimed, "I'm never flying this airline again!"

"That's too bad," the purser said, maintaining her composure. Ignoring her, the man headed to his seat.

The first couple of hours of the flight, he had his arms tightly crossed on his chest, a menacing grimace on his face. You know the look: "I'm mad, don't talk to me!"

By the third hour into the flight, he was looking tired and his arms were clasped more loosely. The purser knelt beside him. "Are you the passenger who had a rough day today?"

"Yes, and I'm never flying this airline again."

"Can you tell me what happened?"

He had started his journey in Frankfurt, where he surrendered 30,000 frequent flyer points to be upgrade from coach to business. But when he got to Chicago, business class on the flight to San Francisco was full and the airline didn't credit him the points for this leg of his journey.

How many of us become upset when things don’t go just the way we’d like them to?

Trying to make everything “perfect” is a tense state. Instead of being perfectly okay with the fact life is a kaleidoscope of experiences, you are constantly bucking much of what happens.

With this frame of mind, you can never really relax and just be. Even when you park your carcass in front of the television with pretzels and a beverage, you're not relaxed. Immobile, but not relaxed.

When you want life to be perfect, you go through your day expecting things to be exactly the way you wish them to. When they're not, you’re miserable.

The airline passenger has allowed a concept of what ought to be intrude upon what is. Because things aren't perfect, to his thinking everything is ruined—and he's determined to make everyone else feel miserable too!

The purser was understanding. "You should at least get your points back."

By now the man was feeling bad for behaving so badly, and he felt a need to offer an explanation. "I don't do this for the food. I do it because I have a medical condition."

"What's the matter?" asked the purser.

"Arthritis. My back's going to be killing me for the next several days."

"That's terrible," said the purser. "My grandma had arthritis, and my mother had arthritis."

Beginning to open up, the passenger asked, "What kind?"

"Osteoarthritis."

As he visibly relaxed, they talked about the different kinds of arthritis and he told the purser about the rare type with which he was afflicted.

It was becoming obvious there was a really nice man beneath that angry front. But his belief that things had to go a certain way, or everything was wrong, had got in the way of being the person he really was.

Warming to him, the purser said, "I have a business class seat, but the reading light doesn't work. I had to move the passenger to first because he had a lot of work to do. If you'd like that seat, it'll be just between you and me."

"Why are you doing this for me?" the man asked. Then, feeling embarrassed about how he had behaved, he added, "I'm just a grumpy old man."

Expecting perfection—of situations and of ourselves—is a recipe for misery. We block all enjoyment of the moment because we have a concept of how things ought to be. And when they aren't well, we’re fit to be tied.

You could argue that the man had a right to be mad. After all, he did lose his points. Yet it was from precisely this feeling of being “right” that his tension arose. Feeling justified in his cause—telling himself how wrong the airline was—spoiled his whole day.

You know when you go into a building and those security cameras are always moving, blinking, picking up any kind of threat. That's what it's like for many of us all the time. Our security system is never down. We're always monitoring to see whether things are perfect enough, whether we're measuring up, whether others are pulling their weight.

There’s a much better way to live, one that doesn’t compound difficulties with emotional reactivity when things don’t go according to our preferences. Michael Brown introduces us to it in his books and CDs about The Presence Process. It’s to live from a state of Presence.

When you live from Presence, instead of with expectations of how things should be, you increasingly come to feel, as Michael puts it, that “it’s all good!”