Let it go

By way of introduction, let me tell you a story. Back in 2022 we were flying from Edinburgh to Milan for a family holiday. There was no direct flight, so, we booked Edinburgh -> Dublin in the morning, and Dublin -> Milan in the afternoon. We booked the flights about 6 months in advance and forgot about it.

Fast forward to about a month before the flight, and we get a notification that they've been forced to cancel our Edinburgh flight because of air traffic control reasons out of their control. We're given a (free) link to change our flight or get our money back. Fair enough, these things happen. We log in to just go a day early (no big issue) and find out that when we booked our original flights we made a mistake and booked them a week apart not on the same day. Unforutnately for us, the correct flight was the one which was changed!. This meant we had to pay ~400 Euro to rebook our tickets.

What was really really interesting was Maaike and my reactions to this. I was absolutley livid about our stupid stupid mistake. How ****ing stupid could we be? All that money down the drain... so stupid. Maaike was annoyed for about 30 seconds, and then pivoted to "how lucky was this?", and I was like LUCKY??!?!?!? LUCKY?!??!? WTF?. And she calmy explained that yes,it was lucky, because if we hadn't had the flight change, we would never have checked our flights, and then we would have had a really expensive last minute booking, or else to miss the family holiday, both of which would have been far worse.

It really took me days to stop being annoyed, maybe a week.. but within literally seconds she had found a way to spin it to a positive. This is a skill I'm really really bad at, but something I want to get better at. Anyway, I was telling this to a friend of mine, and she said, oh yes, I have a "fuckup account", where I put $XXXX into it at the start of the year, and it's just my budget for fuckups, then when they happen I just take the money out of there and move on. I decided this was something I wanted to copy (but I rebranded it to letitgo, just incase I needed to call up the bank and had to go "so, I've a problem with my fuckup account"). Anyway I did, and I've found it a useful mind-hack for me. This way I get to more easily just accept that mistakes happen, they're budgeted for, and move on.

Oh, and one nice thing! I have a dedicated account for this, and it's an interest bearing account, so, mostly the mistakes just evapourate by the end of the year via the magic of accumulated interest! :party_parrot: ;)