Wednesday Walk: Patience
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Every Wednesday, I share random thoughts and tidbits with links to let you do some exploring, which I hope generate interesting ideas. I’d love to hear if any of these topics lead you into an intellectual rabbit hole and what you find when you get there!
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This past weekend, my family and I took our first airplane trip since February, 2020, flying to Kansas City to spend Father’s Day with my parents and sister.
The entire trip made me realize how much has changed over the past two years and how the pandemic exposed the cracks in our old systems. The only way to get through the world today is with an abundance of patience and grace.
We decided to fly out of New York, as my wife is from there and we could also visit her family before departing. The drive from Massachusetts is usually about 4 hours, but it took us nearly 6 hours on Friday afternoon. The delays were caused by car accidents, construction, and general rush hour volume.
I kept thinking about the state of the infrastructure in this country as we sat in traffic. There are some improvements that have been made recently along this familiar drive- where I-91 meets I-95 in New Haven, CT and where I-91 meets I-84 in Hartford are both vastly improved. Yet, there are plenty of other sections that cannot handle the peak traffic and it crawls to a stand still.
You would think high gas prices would reduce demand, but that doesn’t seem to be the case (although as I discussed last week, most of us are forced to drive to run even basic errands).
It may seem like the obvious solution to high traffic is more roads or more lanes, but the principle of induced demand has shown that widening a highway actually makes traffic worse. Basically, the greater the capacity, the more that capacity gets taken up with new demand (think of it like expanding your closet and then buying more clothes to hang in that closet).
So what can you do but sit in traffic patiently?
The theme of patience continued at the airport, when our flight time continually got delayed until we left nearly an hour behind schedule. A few years ago, an hour would’ve felt like a big delay, but these days, we felt grateful to have had our flight take off at all!
When we travel as a family, we check bags. Upon arriving in Kansas City, one of our bags was unloaded and one was not. The ground crew was unable to confirm the location of my bag- they only took my information and promised to deliver the bag if and when it was found.
I had no easy way to get more information (both phone numbers I was provided left me on hold with no indication of wait time). I went to Target, bought some essential clothes and toiletry items, and made the best of it (that’s me rocking an undershirt all weekend). My only choice was patience.
My bag was eventually located and delivered to my parents’ house, but it was nearly 48 hours after we had checked it in at JFK, which is the longest I’ve ever waited for a lost bag.
These are my specific anecdotes about this specific weekend, but I know that we all have similar stories. Supply chain disruptions have us waiting weeks or months for goods that were often delivered in days and staffing shortages in all industries have made it harder to find somebody to solve a problem when it happens. Inflation and rising overhead costs have caused prices on nearly everything to increase over the last two years.
I’m not sure that we’ll ever get back to our on-demand, instant gratification, and low priced culture again. Honestly, I’m okay with that. I didn’t mind the waiting, whether in traffic on the freeway, sitting on the tarmac, or waiting for my luggage. I realized I had no choice, so I could get mad and frustrated or I could take positive perspective that things could be much worse.
My only hope is that as cracks like these are exposed, we are paying attention to them and inventing new, more sustainable systems that will make this world function better for everybody. Until we have those in place, our only choice appears to be patience.
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Other Wednesday Walks
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Stay Safe!
Heath