Two Flights Diverged in a Yellow Wood

Hi friends,I started writing this on Monday, the day before I was scheduled to leave town for work. I was complaining, basically—about how easy it is for me to ruin my last night at home because I can't stop fixating on the fact that it's My Last Night at Home. It was both a cathartic whinefest and a convenient segue into my most recent column, which is also about anxiety and its potentially poisonous affect on relationships (Dear Businesslady: How Do I Sequester My Stresses?).But then the narrative zagged on Tuesday evening. ​For the first time in nearly four years of frequent travel, I got bumped from my flight—the last one of the day—and rebooked for first-thing Wednesday morning. I summoned my husband, Doug, and got to work adjusting my hotel reservation and warning my 9am meeting that I'd probably be running late.Now, there's a version of this story that's an utter disaster. For a while, I'd been scheduled to give a workshop at 10am on Wednesday, which would've been cutting it way too close. Plus, the problem with early-morning flights is that they require you to get approximately none sleep the night before, which doesn't bode well for coherent public speaking.But the workshop had already been rescheduled for Friday. My hotel didn't charge a cancellation fee for the night I missed. And by the time Doug pulled up, I'd already gotten a reply back about the meeting ("yes, no problem!!").Thus began the unprecedented: a second Last Night at Home. And magically, somehow the unexpectedness of it all short-circuited the part of my brain that gets all neurotic about traveling. We went out and played trivia, ran into a friend we hadn't seen in a while, and won a giftcard that basically made the whole evening free.On the one hand, it was just a straight-up good night, with the "I wasn't even supposed to be here!" windfall aspect giving some added verve to the proceedings. But because I like to derive lessons from my experiences, I want to say there's a moral here too. Something like: it's silly to worry about the inevitable, because maybe it's not inevitable after all.I'm gonna hold on to the memory of this stolen bonus night as a kind of talisman, and see if I can use it to ward off an anxiety onslaught the next time I'm headed out of town. I mean, even if the inevitable is, in fact, inevitable, that still doesn't mean that worrying over it is productive. It's just a bad habit I've developed, and maybe this weird bit of serendipity will serve as a system shock that resets that pointless subroutine.Also, don't forget that I'm still accepting entries for the book-giveaway contest! (And no, the challenge isn't "count the metaphors mixed into the previous paragraph.") I want to hear about your most memorable professional mistakes—enlightening/funny/ridiculous/horrifying/etc.etc.etc. Today's the official deadline, but if I get amazing stories over the weekend I'm not going to disqualify them on a technicality.I'll announce winners early next week, across various media of sociality—and eventually, in my next dispatch. Stay tuned!~court, AKA BusinessladyP.S. View-from-airplane photos never turn out that well and yet I find them irresistible. Here's a shot from my last trip.