A NEWSLETTER FOR THE PURPOSEFUL TRAVELER, WHERE THE JOURNEY WITHIN MEETS THE JOURNEY WITHOUT.
Happiness Essential: Faith Edition
Happy Fourth of July Weekend!
Every time you board a plane, you practice Faith.
You do not know the pilots. You cannot see the engines. You have no way to verify the thousand systems keeping you in the air. And yet you sit down, buckle in, and trust that the plane will land where it is supposed to land.
That is Faith. Not necessarily the religious kind. The basic human act kind. The everyday kind. Moving forward without knowing exactly how things will unfold.
Travel has always been one of the best teachers of that. The moment you leave home, you are practicing it. Sometimes the lesson arrives in a way you did not plan for.
On my recent trip to Namibia, mine arrived at baggage claim in Windhoek. It started before I even boarded.
Lightning struck a plane at London Heathrow. Those passengers were rerouted onto my flight, and the delay rippled through the rest of the journey. By the time I landed in Johannesburg for my connecting flight to Windhoek, I was running, as fast as my legs could move. I was the last person on that plane. Literally, the last one.
Somewhere between Johannesburg and Windhoek, sitting in my seat catching my breath, I made peace with the idea that my luggage probably had not made on the plane with me. That was the moment when Faith took over. Whatever arrives, I will work with it.
Well, what did not arrive was my bag.
At the counter in Windhoek, a kind woman helped me file the paperwork. That is when I learned my bag had never left the United States. It had been routed to Nashville.
How? Why? I still have no idea, and it did not matter. My concern was more immediate: would my bag arrive intact, and how long would it take?
When I got to my lodge, my ground partner had an emergency bag for me: a t-shirt, underwear, deodorant, a toothbrush. The things you actually need. Thankfully, within a few hours, my bag arrived at the hotel, forty-five minutes from the airport. Intact. Everything in it.
What I took from that, the delay, the sprint through the Johannesburg airport, and the moment of letting go, is that the journey asked me to let go of my grip on how things should go before it even began.
Faith is not always dramatic. Sometimes it is a calm woman at a counter and a bag that finds its way home.
