How A Missed Flight Changed A Life

By Mary-Rose Abraham of Yahoo! Travel:

What does it mean when you purposely miss a flight back home?

There were three of us who didn’t make it onto the plane late that night in Los Angeles. Two businessmen were loudly demanding another flight to make their morning meeting in New York. But when it was my turn for the lone airline agent to rebook my flight, I greeted her with the same nonchalance as when I walked to the gate and found the jetway doors shut. Oh well. 

In many years of traveling, it was the first time I had missed a flight on purpose. When I should have been running to the gate, I spent the time combing my hair in the bathroom, not hearing my co-worker’s frantic phone calls from the plane. But I knew why I had no sense of urgency: because I didn’t want to go home. Because it was at that moment that I realized that New York didn’t mean home anymore.

A night at LAX can lead to an epiphany (Photo: ekash/E+/Getty Images)

It was nearly midnight, and the terminal at LAX was empty. I considered sleeping at the gate since I was rebooked on the first flight of the morning, but I wanted to get away from the airport. As I took a taxi back to my mom’s home, the place where I grew up and where I always stayed during a work trip, I realized that I had only bought myself a few hours before I had to turn back and get on the plane again. But even that felt like a little triumph: more time away from New York.

It was the final sign that I had to leave that city. And it was no surprise that it happened at an airport. During my four years in New York, the airport has always been where I felt most strongly about where I wanted to be. At first, I would actually sense a dull ache when looking at the distant New York City skyline from a gate at JFK, and excitement upon seeing it again from the terminal on my return. A few years later, I felt neither, only resignation. The airport was my emotional gauge, providing some clarity during a time of devastating change.

New York’s energy can be a blessing and a curse (Photo: Roman Kruglov/Flickr)

My second year of living in New York came to mean loss, hitting all at one time. My marriage fell apart. My father became very ill and passed away within months. Close friends left one by one. At times, it all seemed like more than I could bear. I was actually grateful for the energy of the big city — maneuvering through a crowded sidewalk, packing into a subway train, working long hours as a journalist at a television network — that demanded my attention and stopped me from lying down to wallow in self-pity. It buoyed my own surprising strength during one of the worst times in my life.

By year four of living there, I recovered enough to look forward instead of back. No longer did I want the frantic energy of the city, nor a life that had seemed to stagnate in its sameness. The next move would have to be bold, to test my newfound strength. I found out what it was during my first vacation in many years.

I chose Morocco, a place I’d wanted to visit for a long time. My vacation was a small group tour visiting much of the country for nearly two weeks. As I traveled through a place so wholly different from the U.S., meeting local people and spending time with my fellow travelers who came from all over the world, my little life in New York suddenly seemed rather provincial. So it got me thinking that instead of just visiting, why not consider living in another country?

There were good reasons. It would be a challenging next step for my career. When I shared the idea with a longtime mentor, an accomplished journalist whom I deeply respected, he revealed that one of his few regrets was not accepting a job opportunity in China many years before.

Most of all, I had my airport test. Just imagining my arrival at the airport of this unknown destination filled me with excitement but also a lot of fear. A gauge that moving abroad was the right choice.

That’s the great thing about airports: the promise of new and life-changing adventures (Photo: Francemora/iStock/Thinkstock)

I thought back to my missed flight from a few months ago. I lost money on cab rides and missed an entire day of work. But that experience is what gave me the proverbial kick in the pants not just to daydream about the idea of moving away, but to actually take steps to leave.