I Love It When A Plan Comes Together

But what happens when it doesn’t?  What happens when all the effort you put into making a plan, a really good plan, a lifetime plan, a plan that will get you from here to there, that will help you survive this/that/and the other slips out of sync with reality?  That slippery reality that seems to find a way to do whatever it wants no matter how you try to keep it in the boundaries of the plan?  “Never goes smooth. How come it never goes smooth? “

Plans are built on logic.  They may not be mathematical, but they put all the pieces together into an order that fits, into something that makes stair steps of progress, that connects everything in the best possible way to achieve the goal.  And that’s exactly the problem.  Life isn’t logical, at least not the way we think of logic.  It isn’t logical in that left brain, linear, clear cut, black/white way that we want it to be.  If it were then philosophy, poetry, even music wouldn’t exist.  There’d be no reason for them.  Everything would make sense.  There would be no doubt, no questioning, now feelings without resolution, no mystery, no magic, no creation that wasn’t sterile and well thought out beforehand.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t plan things.  Plans are fabulous tools and without them many things we strive for just wouldn’t be possible.  Heck, grocery shopping might not be possible without a plan and a list.  I mean, who could get through the acres of aisles and all the advertisements and POP displays and shiny objects if you don’t have a list and a plan?  Thousands of people would die each year lost in the aisles, their voices echoing “oh look….”  Plans are good.  They help us get through the rough times, the difficult portions of the job, the “do I have to’s” and the “Oh, god!” need tos in order to get to the goal. Goals are great if they are a structure we can use, like a ladder allowing us access to something above or below us that is too far to jump.  They are terrible if they become a cage we don’t look out of.  “Well, what you plan and what takes place ain’t ever exactly been similar.”

If our plans are flexible enough to change and bend and sway with what goes on around us, if they are able to change as we change, then they are good to have.  If they aren’t, if they are holding us back instead of propelling us forward, time to jettison them.  Because your loyalty should be to you, not to an arbitrary, if brilliant, plan.  “If you can’t do something smart, do something right.”