I heard a story recently about two passengers stuck on a snow-delayed flight to France. Four hours on the ground, a fifty-minute journey stretched into an afternoon of waiting. Two passengers sitting side by side. Same situation, radically different experiences.
One passenger was spiralling into catastrophic thoughts about parking fees and missed connections. The other simply settled in with a book they'd been meaning to read.
What's the difference? It's not personality. It's not positivity. It's something far more interesting.
Not because either passenger was somehow more enlightened. Not because they didn't have places to be. But this situation perfectly illustrates something I've stumbled upon: the fascinating truth about human experience: We're not actually experiencing our circumstances. We're experiencing our thinking about our circumstances.
Think about that for a moment.
The delay wasn't creating the first passenger's distress—her thoughts about the delay were. The same delay wasn't creating the other passenger's peace—their thoughts about it were. Same reality, different internal weather systems.
"But the costs are real!" one might argue. "The missed connections are real!"
That's right, of course. The circumstances were real. But here's what's fascinating: suffering about those circumstances is optional. Not easy to avoid, perhaps, but optional nonetheless.
It's like being caught in actual weather. You can't control the rain, but you can decide whether to:
Dance in it
Run from it
Complain about it
Or simply notice it's raining
The circumstances don't change. But your experience of them transforms completely.
This isn't about positive thinking. It's not about pretending delays are fun or costs don't matter. It's about seeing that our experience of any situation comes from our thinking, not from the situation itself.
When we see this, something remarkable happens: We stop adding suffering to circumstances that might be challenging but don't inherently contain suffering.
Four hours on a grounded plane is four hours on a grounded plane. But it doesn't have to be four hours of misery. It could be four hours of:
Reading that book you've been meaning to start
Having an interesting conversation
Catching up on rest
Or simply being present with whatever is
The delay will end when it ends. The costs will be what they'll be. The connections will either be made or missed.
But how we experience those hours? That's up to us.
What might shift in your next "delayed plane" moment if you saw it this way?
