Not Pictured.
Life isn't always choose-your-adventure, but it is always choose-your-response.
We compare our private lives to other people's public personas. It hurts both parties when, again and again, we leave the real story out. If you edit out all the messy bits, it's easy to feel alone in the struggle. When someone compares their reality to the carefully-edited highlight reel, they develop warped impressions about what life, love, and success really look like. This kind of comparison breeds discontent and drives people to do things they don't want and spend money they don't have.
This last week my husband and I took a trip with our kids. (When you have young children, you take family “trips” not “vacations.”) Upon our return, I thought about the pictures I might post on the Gram for family and close friends who like to follow our little adventures. I was cognizant that the images I captured would fail to tell the entire truth about our travels. They don't contain the moments we will remember the most.
We planned to spend three nights in Malta before my husband left the country for a two-month work trip. (For reference: we currently live in Germany, so it wasn't quick picking up and gallivanting halfway across the globe). "It will be an adventure!" we said—famous last words. Adventures are rarely fun while you actually have them. Needless to say, on this particular excursion we most certainly made some memories…
Malta is a vibe. It has a decidedly North-Africa-meets-the-Med look, smell, taste, and feel. The destination is beautiful and a bit third-world, too. It's a small island of rock in the middle of the sea. Its strategic position in the Mediterranean has made it a sought-after piece of real estate for countries for centuries.
Malta is a land of stories. Many movies have been filmed in the capital city of Valletta. Gladiator. The Count of Monte Cristo. Game of Thrones. Troy. The Spy Who Loved Me. It’s quite picturesque. We walked by several camera crews while we trekked through the city streets.
If you flip through my phone to see images of the trip, you'll find beautiful photos of unique architecture and the sparkling coast. There are also lots and lots of attempts to get a shot where two adults and two five-year-olds are all looking at the camera and smiling (because, let's be real… for every one nice family picture you see on social media there are at least fifty more on the cutting room floor that are not so perfect).
These are the things that weren't adequately captured on my photo reel:
Our AirBNB.
AirBNBs are a gamble, especially when traveling internationally. Sometimes you score, and sometimes… you get a story! We found a neat spot to stay. We were excited… until it started raining and the roof started leaking. We also hadn't fully appreciated that on this beautiful island of rock, everything is made out of… you guessed it…rock. Stone houses with tall ceilings are difficult to heat. Ours only had small, struggling poorly-functioning furnace units in the bedrooms. The little bit of warmth they did kick out wafted to the top of the 25-foot ceilings. When it dropped to 30 degrees outside, it started to feel reeeally frosty in the casa. We gathered all of the blankets in the house, moved into one bedroom, and stuffed towels under the door to avoid letting any warm air out. We would have slept in our coats, but they were wet from our walk in the rain.
As the temperature continued to drop, my husband and I looked at each other, laughing while our teeth chattered. We were amused, but nothing about our circumstances was the least bit relaxing. Making matters worse, my daughter was sick. She was an absolute champ, but the poor girl was clearly miserable. Quickly, we conducted an Annie-Duke-style sunk-cost analysis. Because...behavioral science. We decided we could have the cultural experience we wanted with one night instead of three. Staycation and spending our final days together in a heated house sounded much more appealing than spending the rest of the week at the AirBNB. So, we rebooked our flights back home and planned to return home the following afternoon.
The car accident.
My husband had skillfully dusted off his driving-on-the-left driving skills for this trip from the years we spent living in the UK (Malta used to be a British colony). He has had pretty extensive combat driving training and grew up in a third-world country, so zipping around on tiny European streets doesn't phase him. If you can drive an armored vehicle while the Taliban is lighting you up, you can navigate anywhere. But, when you drive (and when you move through life), one of the factors you can never control is other people.
No one wants to be in a wreck. You especially don't want to have this happen in your rental car. It gets even more complicated when you're in a foreign country. We were 10 minutes from the airport going through a roundabout when CRUNCH. The sound of the crumpled metal was quickly followed by some cursing. My son immediately got curious about the new vocabulary words he just heard. Ughhh…. Why this? Why now?
A flurry of calls and WhatsApp messages to the rental car company and local authorities followed. We tried our best to climb over the language barrier with the other party involved in the incident. He spoke no English. And, then, finally, we were on our way. We had a razor-thin time window with no remaining margin of error for us to check our bags and get on our flight. My two tiny humans and I raced across a parking lot to Departures with our bags and backpacks. My husband hung back and sorted out our shenanigans with the rental agent. I tried to temper my inner urgency with patience as I encouraged my kids to "walk with purpose." We were down to the wire with no margin of error. "Please check our bags and let us get on this flight!" I prayed as we approached the Lufthansa counter.
My cortisol was running high, but so was my level of gratitude. The situation was not what anyone would have chosen but at least, I reminded myself, I was not in a Maltese hospital with a seriously injured child.
Miraculously, we walked straight onto the flight and buckled our seatbelts. Six hours later we stepped into our house, cranked the heat, and collapsed. Technically, I sat down a few hours later after everything was completely unpacked because I'm That Person.)
For more than two thousand years, people have walked the streets we traveled in Valletta. They each have their own tale. A shipwreck waylaid Saint Paul in Malta around 60 A.D. for about three months. The detour wasn’t part of his plan, but he made the most of it. During his tenure on the island, he was attacked by a poisonous snake but suffered no harm. Like Paul, our time in Malta included some unanticipated excitement. We too left, thankfully, unscathed.
My life is not glamorous. No one's is. When we cast a glance in someone's direction and muse, "It must be nice…" it's crucial to remember that everyone you encounter is living a story you know nothing about. When you see pictures of people's lives, always consider the crop.
I already have enough distance from the debacle(s) that I can smile, laugh, and appreciate that this will go down not as "The Best Trip" we've ever taken, but it definitely will be one of the more memorable ones. It would be easy for my husband and me to Monday Morning Quarterback what we "should" have done differently. People tend to do this kind of thing far too often. We are quick to question what we should have done differently based on the information that hindsight affords us. In reality, we all have to move through our lives making decisions to the best of our ability with incomplete, imperfect information.
We should have gone someplace other than Malta.
We should have stayed home.
We should have stuck with the original itinerary.
We should have left three minutes earlier.
We should have taken a different route to the airport.
Should. Should. Should. The only place that word leads to is frustration, emotional gridlock, and, too often, shame. "I should have" is a masochistic mental game. We didn't, so none of the previous possibilities matter. Those paths are closed.
Stuff happens. Much of it is outside of our control. When our real doesn't match the ideal, we need to corral our thinking. No one can turn back time. The best thing we can do is radically accept what is and wisely decide how to respond to it. Our reaction includes the frame we put around certain situations—our perspective. In challenging situations, strategically select your attitude. It will set a tone and the cascade of feelings and behaviors that follow any given happening. We create our own sequences of event after an initial stimulus. The thoughts we entertain, how we manage our emotions, and the actions we take determine whether we experience some of life's inevitable pain or if we create our own suffering. Life isn't always choose-your-adventure, but it is always choose-your-response.
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