That tired cliche about death and taxes. You can count on them. Add to the cliche: plans go awry. You will spend a great portion of your life making plans. Some of them in hindsight will be mistakes. Some, foundations.
If you write things, you already know what I’m talking about. Characters, storylines, whole worlds evolve over time and sometimes don’t even resemble the concept you set out to write.
If you are raising children you know things have a high chance of going sideways and your flexibility skills magically grow moment by moment.
If you’re in a relationship you’ve figured out the vision you had in mind will evolve and morph over time to expand with you as you and your partner grow, and if evolution isn’t possible a bigger change may need to happen.
If you’re part of projects at work, you definitely know you can count on things changing. Lots of people’s input, lots of moving parts, lots of unseen, unpredictable scenarios.
The security we can give ourselves is adding to the planning the many options we have on how to choose to react and act when, and it will be when, not if, things go awry.
I love to make a wide variety of breads, always have, long before these covid times. Dinner roll wrapped sausage and cheese breakfast kolaches. Pizza crusts. Sandwich bread. Focaccia with dried tomatoes, black olives and too much but oh so good salt. After years of fooling around with yeast doughs, there’s at least an 85% chance the result will be good, sometimes amazing. The times things go wonky, there’s still a tasty treat that simply turned out differently that I planned. In the very rare moments a finished bread isn’t edible…it is compostable.
With a lifetime filled with planning, it’s important to try not to fight the fact that things will very often not go to plan.
1 thought on “Plans Awry | Count On It”