Logistics: What Happens When You Hand Over the Keys

The skies were blue and the roads dry. The Blue Car started right up (it seems to be past its recent temper tantrums), and I was on the road at 7 a.m., heading 225 miles south from Boston to New Jersey. Traffic was light, and I felt a thrill of excitement as I exited the Garden State Parkway and arrived at my destination.

In the small office, I handed over the Blue Car’s original title (yikes) and was given a sheaf of papers. Driving around the side of the building to the large handling yard, I found a worker who directed me between moving tractor trailers to an empty spot in a vast grid of parked cars. A Porsche 911 GT3 sat two cars to the right, a Ferrari four cars to the left. The Blue Car was in good company.

As I passed over the keys to the stranger standing next to the car, I took in the scene around me. I hadn’t thought much about my destination until then; I assumed I was dropping the car at a small holding location near Port Newark/New York until it was loaded into a container and lifted onto a ship headed across the Atlantic. The scale of the operation was far larger than I had imagined. And there, on the side of the sprawling warehouse, was a word that seemed to encompass it all: Logistics.

I felt a little thrill. I have always been intrigued by trains and ships, by how things move and fit together. And here it was, all laid out before me in the office, in the yard, in the transport of the Blue Car over the coming days and weeks. Everything moving and being stored, flowing from origin to destination, arriving in the right place at the right time.

Questions swirled, even as I felt the butterflies of knowing my road trip is only weeks away. Even as I felt a twinge of nervousness about handing the beloved Blue Car over to strangers for its ocean voyage.

How do they get the cars to the port? Do they only ship cars from that yard? How do they determine where the containers go on the ship? Would the Blue Car be in the middle of the pack, or in a container right there on the edge of the ship? What system do they use to lock the containers down and together? 

Can you tell that visions of the Baltimore Key Bridge container ship crash are still fresh in my mind?

I had four hours to think as I sat in the “Quiet Car” on my Amtrak train back to Boston. While the holding yard, trucks, and container port are worlds away from my daily experience, it occurred to me that my life, too, is filled with logistical complexity—and with many things I can’t control. Logistics is simply another word for life management, for my inner warehouse. And maybe that’s the shift I’m in now—not trying to oversee every detail but deciding where control still matters and where it doesn’t.

For the past month, piles of clothes, hiking gear, and far too many shoes have migrated from my bedroom floor to the sofa, to the dining room, to the entry table, and back again. I understood as I moved the piles around my apartment that this action gave me the false sense that I was making progress in my packing.

My spreadsheet of trip dates and locations is still mostly empty. I have marked which country I will be in and have listed a hypothetical tally of my days in the EU/Schengen Area to ensure I stay within my allowed limit of ninety. But the parts are still shifting and will continue to move. I was late getting the car to New Jersey by ten days, which means I will be waiting for the car—the car won’t be waiting for me. Now I have decisions to make about what to do while I wait in the UK, a non-Schengen country, so I don’t use up those precious ninety days before I am back in the driver’s seat.

These logistical questions are a new type. I have shifted away from monthly calendars filled to the brim with colliding obligations and squashed appointments toward counting Schengen days and pondering shifting cells in spreadsheets. My life is no longer about being busy, about the logistics of fitting more into already jam-packed days. I am gaining expertise in managing a new kind of complexity created by spaciousness and curiosity rather than compression and optimization. And with it comes the task of managing uncertainty. Of handing over the keys to a stranger.

In December, my children gave me a puzzle for Chanukah. I pulled off the wrapping paper to the sound of their laughter and stared at the image on the box lid: a simple rectangle, all one color, no variation. The label proudly proclaimed White Puzzle with One Missing Piece.

I haven’t opened the box yet. I’m still gearing up for that particular challenge.

When I was growing up, there was almost always a puzzle spread out on the card table on our tiny sun porch. I loved the order of it—the sorting by color, the satisfaction of fitting each piece exactly where it belonged. And in a habit that greatly irritated my older brothers, I hid one piece of every new puzzle in my room so I could be the one to finish it, to place the final piece with a flourish and make the picture complete.

Looking at that all-white puzzle after dropping off the Blue Car, I had an epiphany. Puzzles assume there is a finished picture waiting and that every piece has one correct place. Logistics doesn’t. Logistics assumes handoffs, delays, rerouting, and trust. It’s built for movement, not completion.

That may be the difference I’m still learning to live with. The little girl who wanted order and closure has given way to an adult life with fewer fixed answers and far more variables. I no longer have too many things crammed into the calendar. I have a box of pieces that can fit in many ways—and some that may never fit at all.

Abundance doesn’t simplify logistics; it complicates them. When every piece is different, every choice matters. Which pieces do I pick up? Which do I set aside? Which do I hand over to someone else?

And what about the missing piece? It takes the pressure off. No matter my planning, I will miss things—on this road trip and in life. There will be places just kilometers away I never know existed, reservations I should have made months earlier. I already know this… just as I know that puzzle has missing a piece. I just don’t know which one. Accepting that feels like relief, not failure.

A puzzle wants to be solved. The logistics of my life right now doesn’t. It wants to keep things moving.

Handing over the Blue Car keys wasn’t about giving up control. It was about deciding where control still mattered—and where it didn’t. That distinction feels new to me. Harder. More adult.

There is, of course, one place where precision still matters: the Blue Car needs to arrive in Le Havre safely and on time. For that, I trust the professionals. For everything else, I trust myself to live well inside uncertainty.

The rest will reveal itself in motion.