by Yitz Miller
Growing up, I received the lesson: “If it didn’t turn out the way you wanted it, it’s because you didn’t plan sufficiently.” I’ve worked hard through my life to move past that limbically-wired (pre-cognitive) self-blame. Confidence, trust, faith, non-attachment, and many other psycho-spiritual concepts are well warranted. But in this column, I’d like to offer the option “It will be better than ever imagined.”
“It’s all part of the bigger plan” and “Detach yourself from the outcome” (for example) are two blatantly-valid concepts which deeply serve many people, but which haven’t proven personally effective with this particular challenge, for this particular Buddhist-adjacent UnOrthodox Rabbi. And—ingrained particularly as an ER Chaplain—I write this column with full endorsement that phrases like: “It will all be ok” are well-used to provide empathetic comfort, and that collectivist theology is rarely comforting in individual hospital rooms.
As many of you know, Mónica and I have been traveling extensively now for nearly a year.
- Fact: Even with a lifetime of travel planning and an enjoyment of it, “stuff” regularly happens in travel that is beyond “reasonably foreseeable” for me (to usurp legal language that delineates accident from negligence).
- Assessment: My self-blame is often incongruous with “reasonable foreseeability.” But this year I observed something that I had never calibrated:
- Fact: Far more often than the sh*t-storm my fears predict, the situation-that’s-not-turning-out-how-I-planned it turns out far better.
- Fact: One of Mónica’s greatest assets is her positivity, and one of her truly miraculous skills is the ability to—somehow—get me back “above the line” when these things happen.
A small-but-tangible case-in-point: Less than 2 weeks after Monica and I met, I booked us on a Boston Harbor dinner-dance evening cruise. To say she “dressed for the occasion” would be a serious understatement.
We arrived at the dock a half hour before departure. Nobody there. The boat was there, but it was dark…and closed.
I dialed City Experiences / Hornblower (who I will explicitly name here because they rocked-it on the customer service in this case). I reached the local office and heard the words: “Didn’t you get the email that tonight we’re using the smaller boat which departs from World Trade Center Pier, not Rowe’s Wharf?”
“Uh…no, or if I did, I didn’t see it. The ticket says Rowe’s Wharf, which is where we are. So, how far is the Pier where the boat is, and what do we do now?”
“When I walk it, it takes me 15-20-minutes,” said the local rep, obviously familiar with the situation, “and my guess is an Uber will be slower on a Saturday night.” I’m at the Pier, so if you think you can make it, I’ll go over to the boat and see how long the Captain’s willing to hold it…but to set appropriate expectations, there are 150 people booked for tonight and it’s already 7:45, so my guess is 5-10 minutes, maximum.
Monica’s never been willing to share precisely how many blisters she must have had after speed-walking 8/10-of-a-mile in 4” heels, but there we stood, looking across the rather wide Boston Harbor berth to the dock where the ship had been moments before while we watched it depart at 8:08…her looking spectacular, and me mired in embarrassment and shame. I hung up with the ticket agent (who had stayed on the phone with us for most of the time). Her words “Give us a call tomorrow and we’ll see if there’s anything we can do” offeed little confidence that even the amount of time it would take me to reach someone on the phone would be worth the effort.
“Is there a good pizza place between here and your apartment?” Mónica asked with a knowing grin, “because I’d love to pick up a little something and eat it while I’m soaking these feet before you unzip this dress, if you might be willing to do that.” The photo of me in my dinner jacket, and her in sequins—with both of us holding a pizza—is still one of my favorites.
The choice point that’s relevant here came the next day. I decided to give Hornblower a call, and decided not to give them the piece-of-my-mind I was thoroughly-convinced they wholly-deserved.
“This was insufficient notice” seemed an unreasonable argument, since apparently everyone else on the boat knew its departure point—or at least they weren’t all standing at Rowe’s Wharf next to us, also wondering what was going on. Instead, I honestly—and not without embarrassment—told her that I had, in fact, found the email she had referenced—in my spam folder, timestamped 8 hours before departure.
I was fully-prepared for quintessential corporate non-responsibility…which wasn’t what happened and which is why I’m willing to put the company’s name in this post. “We had a glitch the day you made your reservation,” she said, “We emailed you and the two other couples who booked that day as soon as we noticed the departure location error this morning. I’m sorry we didn’t call. Thank you for calling us back, and thank you for the attitude you’re taking about it. Let me see what I can do and I’ll get back to you this afternoon.”
I will confess to being shocked when she actually did so, and even more surprised when I received an email with a refund-receipt for the full cost of the cruise plus a voucher for the same cruise any day within the next year, and then received a voicemail from her confirming I had received the email.
I reflected that afternoon on how often—when I do my part—things turn out “even better than I ever imagined” (of course not always, but substantially more-often-than-not). And then it occurred to me that that reality was not only true, but that outcome was actually foreseeable, because of how regularly I lived a process that guaranteed the truth of that statement.
I had a close friend in high school whose father was a cellular chemistry professor, and also an ordained minister. I’ve always remembered the title of the book he intended to write, and was thrilled to see that it finally got published in 2022: “Choosing Your Way Through Life,” (though I was less-thrilled when Google also informed me that he had passed away in 2024).
I realized the afternoon after the pizza-party that not only does “Choosing Your Way Through Life” accurately reflect “Embrace the Now, and Discern the Next Right Step” (or however one wishes to describe that particular philosophy), but it actually a formulaic guarantee that things will turn out better than they would otherwise. Why? because through that process, at every “next-present-moment” the direction is being adjusted to account for all available information—including information about those things that might not have been foreseeable.
I just re-booked the cruise for our upcoming 1-year anniversary.
With love, and the relentless quest to catalyze more of it,
Yitz
