Plans fail

Plans fail, this is the only title that I have right now and it is just going to have to suffice.

I am not a person for whom planning comes naturally. I tell people I hate planning. However, one glance at my hyper-scheduled life would tell you one thing-I hate to plan because I have to. I hate the hours of work to plan and put something in order. I can do it. I hate to think through the future-however my future templates and plans are those of a CEO of a fortune 500 company, where to be to take this meeting, what to do to handle this snafu.

I think we get told a lot that planning is the answer, the solution. If you just planned your time better . . . If you were just more realistic . . . If you were well prepared. This ends up with me trying to be hyper-prepared. If I can be prepared then things will not be so horrible, so awful, things will be and feel manageable.

I take all kinds of precautions and steps to plan into the future. Once my passport comes back through USPS air mail these are the steps I will take to be out the door in 20 minutes and on my way to the airport for that flight. While there is something to be said for planning in said instance I found out that I needed a particular form and I had to fill that out in the airport all the while panicking about missing my flight. I did not plan to spend every last second and minute of layovers on U.S soil that day finishing up my homework. I just did it.

I came up with the solution for long days and hours on the road-to have snacks in my car at all times in case of emergency. Last summer, I moved and transported my houseplants in the back of my car, thinking nothing of it. A month later I found an entire ant COLONY living in the back of my car. It was gross, I screamed, panicked and cried. Notice a theme of all my endless planning?

This summer I did not plan to have a deer hit my car. I could have planned by having my insurance include a car rental but I did not. However, this is a plan that I have changed for next time.

I realize that I buy into this lie that planning will save me.

Planning cannot save me. No amount of planning could change my Grandmother’s death earlier this year or my response to it. I did plan beforehand to take off time because I knew that I would need it and I knew that my client’s needed someone who could be present to their pain. No amount of planning could prepare me for my Dad’s cancer diagnosis. Those words that still have the power to wreck me.

This last week I ended up without a working toilet and after hours of begging and being gaslit I ended up in a new apartment. I had planned to stay there. I had scrubbed the last of the mold from the toilet the week before. I had finally hung the last item of art on my walls the week before.

The anger, the rage, the hurt, the feelings of frustration of one more thing not going according to plan shook me. I am still shaken. Planning has once again failed me. Only maybe it was that I put too much belief in planning in the first place.

I like to hold tight. Years ago losing someone I loved deeply I had this image of myself with my hands clasped trying to hold onto her. I heard the Lord, or a freind say hold lightly. Yes, she is precious to you but she does not belong to you, hold her lightly. I think I am the same way with plans. I want something to hold fast too, some answer in this crazy clouded world, instead I need to hold lightly. To know that my plans cannot save me, they can only help me and even then often they will fall wildly short because they will never be what I want them to be.

I have to learn to be okay with that and I wish that I handled this gracefully, I wish a lot of things.

Instead I am learning to let go, which I do with crying and sobbing. Maybe one day I will get to surrender, maybe not.