The Cheap Seats

If you’ve ever been to any seated event at a large venue, you know how confusing the seating can be. You arrive at the event, wander helplessly through crowds, trying to locate your destination, and by the time you find your seats, the show is almost halfway over.

Then, less than five minutes after you’re settled in and enjoying the performance, two wandering stragglers appear and announce, “Hey, you’re in our seats.”

You fumble through your pockets, locate your ticket, and hold it up to the stragglers, waiting for the inevitable, “My bad,” from them before they reembark on the quest to find their real seats.  They squint at your ticket and say, “Right seat, wrong section.”

You’ve officially been evicted.

Feeling embarrassed, rejected, and disoriented, you gather your belongings and clumsily make your way to the aisle, where you search for an usher, a venue employee, or anyone who can decode the ancient hieroglyphics they call a venue map in this dimly lit chaos. By the time you manage to locate an employee, you just thrust your ticket forward and let out a pathetic little, “Help?” like a confused newborn kitten desperately searching for its mother.

The employee—an expert at assisting lost and wayward concert-goers—gives a subtle eye roll as he takes your ticket and prepares to seal your fate.  He looks at the ticket, glances at you, and then points to a section right in front of the stage.  “You’re down there,” he says.  “Follow me.”

In less than a minute, you’ve reached your destination, where your guide points at two seats so close that the stage lights pour over them like a beam sent straight from heaven. You and your companion turn to each other, and without uttering a single spoken word, both of you exchange a look that unmistakably says: “We’ve arrived.”

You sit down, settle in, and for the rest of the night, everything—the stage, the crowd, and the vibe—reeks of happily ever after.

I know—a concert isn’t a fairy tale, but the lesson in this story is real: sometimes we settle in the seat we land in, not realizing the ticket in our hands is worth so much more.  Like misreading the print on a ticket, we look at ourselves and don’t realize that we’ve ended up sitting in the wrong section of our own life.

We underestimate ourselves. We don’t think we’re good at this thing, or enough of that thing, and it’s only because we’re not sitting close enough to see the real picture. And it isn’t until we finally get close—close enough to actually see what’s in front of us—close enough for the stage lights to illuminate what was printed on our ticket all along, that we realize our ticket was always meant for better seats than we ever imagined.  We just couldn’t read it from that far back.

When you reach those moments in your life where you find yourself trying to figure out where you belong (and this will happen more than once), remember to stop and look at what you bring. If you can’t see your own worth clearly, you’ll always assume you’re meant for the back row.

It’s only when you really look at yourself—and give yourself permission to see the good instead of defaulting to the flaws—that you’ll finally recognize where you’re supposed to be.  You’ll start to see the value you bring to every place—and every person—lucky enough to have you show up.

And it’s only then that you’ll finally understand that, DAH-ling, you were never meant for the cheap seats.