True Story - Yesterday, we almost missed our flight to Costa Rica

I want to tell you something that happened to us yesterday.

We were getting ready for our trip to Costa Rica. Packing, emails still going out the door, a few coaching calls squeezed in. By the time we fell asleep a few minutes after midnight, we were both exhausted and excited in equal measure. I set an alarm for 3:25 AM. Our Uber was ordered for 4:00. Flight at 6:10.

Then I woke up with that sudden, wrong feeling. Grabbed my phone. 4:51 AM.

My first thought was: I messed up. This is really bad.

A few years ago that moment would have sent me somewhere much darker. Tears. Shame. Anger at myself. A kind of frozen helplessness, and then the whole trip getting poisoned by my own spiral.

Instead I was out of bed telling Michael what happened before I’d fully registered it. He asked how fast I could be ready. Ten minutes, I said. He ordered a new Uber. I brushed my teeth, threw water on my face, and we were in the car at 5:05 with our suitcases.

I have never moved that fast in my life.

In the Uber we had time to face what was probably true: we were going to miss our flight.

The window for checking bags would almost certainly be closed by the time we arrived. In years past, that’s where the blame would have crept in. The cold silence. The sharp words that neither of us really meant but couldn’t stop.

In the Uber, Michael reminded me we were on the same team, no matter what happened. I agreed. We kissed, took a breath, and decided to treat the whole thing as an adventure, to play hard against whatever odds were in front of us.

Then things started opening up.

Michael talked our driver out of dropping us off at the central garage (that the "rules" require for Uber rides) and to take us straight to departures. We walked into the terminal exactly 45 minutes before takeoff. The bag check-in kiosk said it was too late to tag our luggage. We spotted the line for a live agent. Six or seven people ahead of us, and I knew the math didn’t work.

Then I saw an agent with a space open up right in front of me. I called out to her, with my eyes, my hands, my words and my energy. Explained everything, including the part where I’d set my alarm for 3:25 PM instead of AM. She took mercy on us, checked our bags, and waved us through.

We made our flight. We are in Costa Rica right now.

No fighting. No shame spiral. A lot of compassion all around. And, honestly, a real feeling that the universe had our backs.

What made that outcome possible was not luck. Or not only luck.

For that morning to go the way it did, we both had to catch the pull toward despair and refuse to follow it. We had to choose to act from love. We had to believe something good was still possible and move toward it without proof.

None of that happens automatically. It happens because of years of work.

Years of clarifying the patterns that were running us beneath the surface. Years of healing the wounds that used to throw us both into shame, distance, conflict. Years of practicing what we call creating, actively choosing the relationship and the life we want rather than just reacting to what shows up.

I know with real certainty that version of that morning was not available to us five or ten years ago. The wounds were too raw. The triggering patterns were too fast to stop. We would have missed the flight, been a day late, mad at one another and feeling totally stressed and upset.

The work we have done over the years has changed that. It keeps changing it.

That’s what Memorial Weekend is for.

The arc of the full weekend moves through those same three phases. Clarifying: getting honest about what is actually holding you back and what you most want. Healing: beginning to transform the stories from the past that have been quietly running your life. Creating: with that new space open, intentionally beginning to author something different going forward.

Not everyone moves through these in the same order. Some people arrive needing to clarify before anything else is possible. Others come ready to heal something they’ve been circling for years. A few surprise themselves by creating something they couldn’t have imagined at the start.

The weekend holds all of it.

Michael & Penny