It is very easy to be fully clever by half.
Driving to my local airport to park my car and pick up a rental, to then drive to a city without an airport, to then drive from that city to one with an airport (where the rental is dropped off), to then fly back to my parked car. A pretty tight itinerary for an action-packed 26 hours of high performance. Forty hours door to door.
Kicking off this marathon of insanity, I offered a critique of two design sections at a university, saw two graduate students there, and then gave a PowerPoint talk in front of the student body. I may have been fatigued, but the students never looked at their phones in that hour.
The next stop was just as busy. First, there was a Zoom with a bishop, followed by two meetings with parents, students, and teachers using a second PowerPoint presentation. Next were meetings with engineers, followed by a quick measurement of a building for a design project in that second city — all while writing and responding to about 80 emails and texts throughout the two days.
In 26 hours.
All that was left was a quick flight. Genius.
The first flight out left on time then arrived half an hour early. My 32-minute connection time suddenly became an hour. Genius AND lucky!
But then we inexplicably sat in our plane 50 feet outside the entry gate and waited an hour. I missed the connecting flight to my home, the last flight out that night. And since the delay was not the airline’s fault, no free hotel was offered. Not that there were any close enough for the quick turnaround.
But I can catch the next flight out. Twelve hours and an overnight at the Detroit Airport later.
This whole debacle could have been avoided. It could have been just an eight-hour drive back home — I could have spent the night in my bed. Instead, it takes 20 hours to fly home.
Outsmarting yourself assumes you have control, even though you never do. I was not a victim; I did this to myself, and it only happened because God gave me the chutzpah and cleverness to be too smart for my own good.
God gave me the ability to hear students’ designs and suggest ways of seeing those designs that only someone who has done this work for 45 years can. I could then talk to the entire school about the inexplicable beauty of Emily Dickinson’s words and sacred space, because God let me see them and gave me my life’s mission as an architect. Designing, building, mentoring, teaching, inspiring (hopefully). For 26 hours, I enjoyed the fruits of decades of my life’s work.
And, after these joyous efforts of small triumphs, our plane sat for an hour outside our gate, for no known reason. In Detroit.
Because I do not control this.
I had a dozen hours through the night to see the full truth of my inability amidst infinite grace. Walking around the airport in the small hours of the morning is less enjoyable than you might imagine. The appeal of visiting the post-apocalyptic emptiness fades after a few minutes. Once you’ve seen one abandoned food court, you’ve seen them all. Little known fact: Airports are not meant for sleeping. In fact, they are actively designed to be uncomfortable for those who stay longer than a couple of hours. The chairs cannot be made into a bed. The lights are always on, with intermittent noises that disturb the hibernating fools who find themselves stranded.
I wish I could convince myself there was some purpose in all of this: If I could, then I could know the mind of God. I can only apprehend the miracle of life. I cannot reason out the transaction and justice that are simply the life I have been given.
In a world where positions and rationalizations try to define what is correct, the injustice of spending the night in the Detroit Airport could be a grave rallying cry of betrayal against how great Satans — airplanes, airports, our performance culture — has abused me. But that is silly.
When we all die, at one hundred with a loving family or at two in innocent loss, we cannot find the reason or the hideous injustice in any of it. It is simply given to us.
The gift of life is the reason for gratitude: Nothing is earned. We, I, just have to hear God in the beauties (and idiocies) we live every day.
Especially at 3 a.m. in the Detroit Airport.
