Eric’s Blog

It hit me the other day, we were supposed to be setting sail on our cruise to the Caribbean. We’d spent an entire year planning, saving, and dreaming of our trip. At the beginning of March, when the Coronavirus pandemic started becoming serious, we thought, “we’ll hold off for a bit to see how this plays out”. The further into March we got, the more serious things became.

About half-way through the month, we got a notice from our cruise-line that our trip (and many others) were being canceled due to the public health crisis. We had until the end of the month to decide what we were going to do:

1. We could cancel our trip for a full refund of our money.
2. We could schedule a future trip, and get a 125% credit of what we’d paid for our original trip plus a $250 stateroom credit.

We decided to go with a full refund since my wife is a teacher and we can only take time off when school is out. She only has so many days per year that she can take off for either personal or sick days. At the time, we weren’t sure what the schools were going to do; since then, we’ve found out that the DoE has canceled all classes in Virginia for the rest of the year. Not that it matters much, we couldn’t go now if we wanted to, everything is still shut down.

I was hoping to get the money back by now so we could put it into savings and have it go to work for us rather than sit in someone else’s account. Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten our refund yet; I called the cruise line to ask about it, but they’re backlogged right now refunding thousands of people, so we have to be patient and wait our turn.

We’ve been married for almost 21 years, we never had a honeymoon, we haven’t had a vacation in seven years, and we’ve never had an adults-only vacation. This was going to be the honeymoon that we never had.

Of course, this sucks but things could be much worse than they are. We could be on one of the ships that had an outbreak onboard and everyone gets stuck at sea in their stateroom not doing anything. We could have been in a foreign country when the borders closed and not be able to get back home to our kids. There are a thousand reasons that this could be worse, but it’s not.

It’s easy to get down when things don’t work out the way we want them to. It’s even easier to focus on all the bad things in life instead of pausing to enjoy all the amazingly awesome things. There are people out there right now who have lost a loved one or friend to COVID-19. There will likely be plenty more before this whole thing is over and done with. We didn’t get to go on our vacation this spring, but there are plenty of people who have never had a vacation. We’re fortunate to be in a stable place financially where we can set money aside for frivolous things like vacations. There are people where we live that have never been off the Eastern Shore or even seen the ocean!

It all comes down to perspective. We can’t choose the things that happen to us. All we can do is choose how we react to the things that happen to us. Yeah, we’re upset about missing our cruise, but, in the grand scheme of things, we’re going to be okay.

The analogy I like to use is a pot of boiling water. Boil a pot of water…

• Put in some eggs – the eggs turn hard
• Put in some potatoes – the potatoes turn soft
• Put in some tea – you get one of the most delightful drinks known to man
• Put in some coffee – you get one of the most vile drinks known to man

The point is, it doesn’t matter what happens on the outside. In each case, the boiling water is the same. What you’re made of (the stuff you’re made of) changes. Things are going to affect you, but what you’re made of and how you let things affect you makes all the difference.