Today I asked myself why many of our metaphors often connect trees and rivers with life?
I came to the conclusion, that it is because the tree’s roots and the river’s sidearms reflect the reality of living life itself.
In life it is neither expected, nor wanted, that everything works out exactly the way its planned, without ever leaving the same straight path. Instead the whole beauty of this journey is taking what you’re given and reacting towards those many unexpected scenarios.
Stranding at the airport was definitely one of those scenarios for me. I mean I did watch terminal as a kid but I would never have dreamt that I would actually get to experience what it’s like to be stranded at an airport for days. What’s interesting however is that when I got it into my head, that my flight got cancelled and I would now have to find another way to get to Atlanta and probably even spend the night at the airport, I wasn’t that stressed out as I would’ve expected me to be.
When you get stuck somewhere in Germany the experience is generally just annoying. You always have multiple contacts that would still be able to drive you or that you could stay at, making the whole schlick inconvenient but nothing more dramatic. Stranding in America was different. The knowledge that I was completely at the mercy of a flights engine working or the weather behaving did not torture me the way I would have expected it to. It actually did the exact opposite. It gave me a sense of calm.
Airport Breakfast
I was alone in a foreign country without any outside help, so if I were to get out of that situation it would be me and me alone that is responsible. And when the weather decides to play one more dirty trick or the airline goes and cancels the next flight then it’s not me who failed but just another situation I’ve just got to make the best out of.
In an ironic way, with everything being out of my control I actually felt more free, because only then did I realize that I had full control over what I wanted to do. Perhaps it is not ridiculous to take a 16 hour bus ride, maybe it was exactly what I needed to do now.
And even if I don’t make it to Atlanta(I am currently sitting in said flixbus with a 15 hour ride ahead), if the environment beats me, then at least I know that out of all the things I’d feel in then, I would never have to feel regret.
And, bear with me here, I think that’s also the beauty of Design Thinking. The Design Thinking approach guides you so thoroughly through all of the steps of creating your product, that if done right, it might not be able to guarantee success but it is able to guarantee that you did everything you could’ve done.
Let’s say there was a feature you failed to discover that your product really needed. If you followed the Design Thinking approach to the latest then if you really did miss that feature it means that there was no way you would’ve found it anyways. So you may not necessarily find the feature but you will never sit there thinking “man I already had something like that in my mind I just didn’t think about it enough”. Regret is a scary emotion to me because it is one of the few that is completely dependent on your own behaviour. Someone else can make you happy or sad but only your actions (or a lack of such) can make you feel regret.
In life you shouldn’t be frustrated if a situation doesn’t work out the way you want it to, because that will happen all the time, you should however always strive to give your best in each of those situations, because if you give your best every time than you will logically also reach the best possible outcome, even if it is the best outcome out of bad outcomes.
This experience taught me a lot about handling ones emotion and also about Design Thinking(maybe because there isn’t anything else to do in the airport at night). With that said I am really looking forward to applying my new state of mind to our project, provided I will be able to reach Atlanta in time.
And if you are reading this and weren’t in our seminar this year than I would now encourage you to try and find out if I made it or not, by looking at the next blog posts.This post shall remain unedited, so that you, may catch a glimpse of the uncertainty I still feel right now, even after all of these motivational words.
