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Don’t Call It Bad Luck Too Soon · Just Julia

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Don't call it bad luck too soon.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: On Sunday, my husband and I were sitting together buying flights to Brazil for Christmas.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: There were two options from Milan.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: One left from the airport close to our home,
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: the easy one, especially when travelling with a small child.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: The other left from the main airport outside the city,
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  SPEAKER_00: which meant a longer journey, more organisation and a much earlier start.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: We went backwards and forwards between flights,
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: departure times and different combinations so many times that somehow,
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: when I finally pressed purchase, I bought the wrong one.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: The faraway airport.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: I realised almost immediately and we were both annoyed.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Not devastated, obviously.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: This was not a tragedy.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Just one of those irritating mistakes that creates unnecessary complication
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: and makes you wonder how you manage to do something quite so stupid
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: while staring directly at the screen.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: The next morning I called the airline.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: They could change it, the woman told me, but it would cost 200 euros per person.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: No, thank you.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I decided to leave it alone.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: It was inconvenient, but manageable.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: We would organise ourselves, wake up earlier and get to the airport somehow.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: I remember thinking, fine, maybe there is a reason.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Let it be.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: A few days later, an email arrived from the airline.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Our flight had changed,
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: and somehow our already inconvenient journey had become considerably worse.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: The new departure was almost two hours earlier,
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: which meant getting to an airport outside Milan at around three in the morning with
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: a small child.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: My husband asked me for the call centre number.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: You can try, I told him, but they're going to say the same thing.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's 200 euros each to change it.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: He called anyway.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Less than an hour later, he told me to check my inbox.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: The entire outward journey had been changed, free of charge.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: We were now leaving from the airport close to our house,
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: the flight I had wanted in the first place,
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: and somehow we would also arrive in Brazil almost two hours earlier.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: I had already decided how that call would end.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: That, I realised later, was the whole point.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: The mistake had been corrected because something else had gone wrong.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: And the second thing going wrong had actually made everything better.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: I laughed when I saw the new tickets.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Not because I suddenly believed the universe had personally rearranged
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: an airline schedule for my convenience,
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: But because it reminded me how quickly I decide what things mean.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: We do this all the time.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Something changes at work and we decide it is terrible.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: A relationship ends and we decide we have lost something irreplaceable.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: An opportunity disappears and we assume we have missed our chance.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: A plan falls apart and before anything else has had time to happen,
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: we start writing the conclusion.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes, of course, we are right.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Some things are simply painful.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Some losses remain losses.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think we need to force every difficult experience into a story
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: about hidden blessings.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: But sometimes we genuinely don't know yet.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: That is the part I'm trying to remember.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm living through a much bigger unfinished story myself at the moment.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Professionally,
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: many things have changed and I still cannot tell you
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: whether this period will eventually become one of the most important turning points
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: of my life or simply something difficult that I learned to navigate.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have the ending yet.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps that is precisely the problem with the conclusions we make
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: while we are still in the middle.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Looking backwards, meaning is easy to find.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: We can trace the chain of events and say,
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: if that hadn't happened, I wouldn't have met this person.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: If they hadn't said no, I wouldn't have tried that.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: If that door hadn't closed, I never would have looked over there.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: The harder practice is leaving some space while the story is still unfinished.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Not pretending everything is wonderful and not telling ourselves
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: that every disappointment is secretly a gift.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Just resisting the urge to decide too quickly what something means.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe there is something in your life right now that you have already labelled as bad luck.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: A rejection.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: A relationship ending.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: A career change you didn't choose.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: A plan that didn't work.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: Something you thought would happen by now and hasn't.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: What if, for a little while, you stopped trying to decide whether it was good or bad?
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: What if the most honest answer were simply, I don't know yet.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm starting to think there is a strange freedom in that sentence.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: It leaves room for life to move.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: It leaves room for circumstances to change,
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  SPEAKER_00: for another opportunity to appear,
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: for you to become someone who sees the situation differently six months from now.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe one day I will look back at this period of my life
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: and understand exactly why certain things had to happen the way they did.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I won't.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm trying to become less certain about my bad luck.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: Cause sometimes the flight changes again, Just Julia.