As you probably know, Thanksgiving is this week here in the United States. It’s a holiday when we focus on God, family, food, and things we’re generally thankful for. And these days it seems like no better time to reflect on what’s important to us and the values we hold so tightly.

This can also be a hectic time of year with busy people scrambling to prepare all kinds of food for all kinds of guests for the big turkey dinner.

Ree Drummond, known in the cooking world as the “Pioneer Woman”, had some suggestions for making this successful. The first thing is to start prepping on Monday for the meal on Thursday. That’s great advice! And it works for much more than just Thanksgiving dinner.

Take flying, for example. You know what usually sets apart good pilots from bad pilots? The landings. More than anything else about a flight, people remember the landings, especially if they’re bad ones. And you know how to make good landings? You set up your approach early.

Pilots who wait until the last minute to get set up and make corrections generally have more stressful landings. Things can happen, unexpected things, things that distract from the main thing of getting on the ground safely. Pilots have a saying: “Takeoffs are optional, landings are mandatory!” I think we’d all agree with that. But it makes it a lot harder when we let things pile up on us or take our focus away.

A quick bit of humor here. There’s a story of an elderly woman getting off an airliner after a rough landing. She asked the pilot, “Did we land or were we shot down?” Ouch!
Of course, the famous pilot Gen. Chuck Yeager also had a humorous saying: “If you can walk away from a landing, it’s a good landing. If you use the airplane the next day, it’s an outstanding landing.” Let’s try for having more usable airplanes, shall we?

Anyway, being prepared is important for any situation, and that means doing things ahead of time. It’s a lot easier to deal with something when you’re ready for it than to try to think of all the things to do once you’re in over your head, where you can get off track in directions you didn’t intend. Life happens, but we should do what we can to prepare for it.
I hope you have a great Thanksgiving week! If you’re family celebrates it and you’ve already started prepping, you’re well ahead of the game! If you haven’t started yet, there’s still time!

And figuratively speaking, maybe you have a figurative Thursday life event coming up that you know about. See what you can do to start getting ready on the figurative Monday before. Give yourself time to prepare. Don’t get bogged down or lose focus from the main things by letting distracting things pile up. It will help make things go more smoothly.

Happy landings!