When the flight attendant took me down
Writing advice and life advice.
Everyone has it even if it’s as simple as, “Don’t listen to advice.”
But there is no one way to write the same way there’s no one way to live.
On my trip to the Indigo/Chapters Teen Choice Awards a long while ago, the first leg of my trip ended in the flight from Bangor to Philadelphia. I was really psyched because:
I like Philadelphia even if it is just the airport.
I was in the first row of the plane so I was like the third one off. SCORE! That never happens.
Like I said, I am easily psyched.
It turned out that I had to get to another terminal in order to catch my next flight to Toronto. To get there you have to walk through one terminal and go to a place where it says SHUTTLE TO TERMINAL F.
To get to this magical shuttle place you have to go down an escalator.
This should have been nice and easy, except the space at the bottom of the escalator was not big enough to hold the bajillion people who wanted to go on the shuttle, so everyone had to turn immediately right and form a line that ran parallel to the escalator.
This also should be easy, right?
We were smart people who fly on airplanes, forming a line is easy-peasey.
But, apparently not all of us:
Like to form lines.
Understand how to form lines.
Like to follow the directions of the men yelling, “Go to the right! Form a line, people! Go to the right!”
When I came down the escalator there was a flight attendant behind me and I figured that:
She is in a hurry.
She is a bit frustrated by people who fail to form lines.
She is moving on flight-attendant warp speed.
So, when I stepped off the escalator, she stepped off right behind me. I waited for a second to see if the man in front of me understood the whole MOVE TO THE RIGHT AND FORM A LINE THING.
He didn’t.
Flight attendant lady wanted none of this, so she scooted around me, but when she fast-scooted her luggage (on rollers) hit the back of both my knees — one, two — in this perfect way that made me fall right down to the floor on my shins, so it looked like I was praying to the shuttle gods or something.
Not that there are shuttle gods, obviously.
So you must picture me on the floor surrounded by people who can not form a line to the right.
And you must picture all those people staring at me with their mouths wide open.
And you must picture me laughing hysterically because (seriously) how funny is it that I got taken down by a flight attendant’s luggage?
And you must picture everyone thinking I’m a weirdo.
And then I bounced right back up and got in line, because that’s the way this writer rolls. 😉
Is there a point to this story?
Yes and no.
Every story we create out of our lives (or out of fiction or our blog posts or whatever) has underlying truths about us and how we approach life inside of them.
I could have chosen to cry and sue the flight attendant, which would have made me wealthier, probably, which would be nice.
I could have chosen not to tell this story about me falling down, which would make me seem cooler, probably. Also, nice. It would be nice to be cool.
Writing experts, blog experts, life experts, marketing experts, expert experts would probably have told me that my vulnerable story of airport falling wasn’t going to sell any books or papers or convince people to be paid subscribers to this blog, which is what I’m supposed to do because it’s how I earn my living and buy dog food. They’d tell me to write not quite so conversationally. They’d tell me to make sure my SEO has words like ‘tips and hints’ in it to drive blog traffic. They’d tell me to be powerful and strong and act like I know all the damn answers the way they do.
But here’s the thing?
For me, I’m going to form a line when I’m supposed to if it’s helping the greater good. And I’m usually going to laugh if I get knocked down because it’s better than crying – usually.
And I am going to explore the wonderings and the questions that are inside of me about life and writing and people’s love and people’s cruelty, their selfishness and selflessness in every way that I know how. And I am going to find meaning in little things and big things.
My only writing advice, my truest writing advice is the same as my life advice:
Expect that you are going to be stupid sometimes.
Expect that you will fall.
Expect that writing a story, just like a life, is a big adventure that you can’t always control.
A lot of the time, when things are small (like getting taken down by a flight attendant by accident), laughing about it makes you feeling better than going all fisticuffs.
That’s because kindness matters and finding tiny moment of joy do too, even when other things are going wrong.
I don’t think our jobs as humans and as writers isn’t to dictate belief sets to other people, but to give them possibilities, questions to bounce off of and explore, moments of ‘huh’ and ‘what ifs,’ seconds of laughter and failure and poignancy and grace that they can use as a launch pad for their own explorations.
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