Right Now

I'm supposed to be in Chicago right now. But I'm still in Austin.

I went to the airport as scheduled early early this morning to learn once I got there that the flight was delayed 1.5 hours. So I got some breakfast and settled in, even took a cat nap in the uncomfortable lounge area. When I woke, I learned the flight was delayed another hour. And then another. And then ANOTHER. There were multiple reasons given: there were tornados in the Dallas area last night, keeping flights from coming into Texas, there was a hail storm in Austin this morning, damaging some aircraft, and our flight crew was MIA.

Eventually, it got to the point where I wouldn't be getting into Chicago until the end of the day, missing all the meetings I had scheduled. Tomorrow's day was already truncated, with the plan to head back to the airport around mid-day. It didn't seem worth it to go all the way up there for a half day of meetings, so I asked for the credit for the flight and headed into the office here.

When I lived in NY, I heard so many NYers stories of where they were on 9-11-01. There were several near misses -- people missed their train or bus, a child was sick or something else kept them from showing up to the World Trade Center building on time. It reminds me that we don't have the overall picture. While the horror and tragedies that occurred that day are still hard to comprehend, those near misses make me think that sometimes, we aren't supposed to make that plane, or we're supposed to be in traffic.

What if you're exactly where you're supposed to be RIGHT NOW.