Plans and I have a love-hate relationship. They tend to fall apart when I’m halfway through. At that moment, going back sounds as good as going all the way. The pain is equidistant, no matter which way you turn.
Regardless, I’ve made plans, fought with and for those plans, and ultimately, have had to let it all go when I was at the end of my rope. And come daylight, made yet new plans.
Sometimes, it seems planning is the point of a human life — to console yourself that have something to do. For the next week or for the rest of your life. At first, you learn to plan an ordinary day. Weekdays, you work. Weekends, you shop. Thrice a week, you workout.
When this bores, you plan to get out of it. This could be long term or short term: start a new career or go on a holiday. But the truth is, ultimately, you’re bound to be bored when you settle into new plan. Give the business a few years and it’ll start to feel like a chore. A perpetual holiday can also make you feel like your life has no meaning. To top this, you’ll never outrun chores, workout, or work.
And we tend to repeat this pattern in every sphere of life. We fall in love, we break up, we move on, only to fall in love again. Or we get married, continue being married, have kids, or divorce our partners. Each option has its own course set out.
Either way, we keep planning our next move even though life usually sends us on quite a different path.
A friend recently said goodbye to a twenty-year old marriage. He’s decided to sell his house and travel because none of his plans worked out and he no longer saw the point of planning his life. Where he’s going and for how long, he doesn’t know. When I asked him what he hopes to find, he didn’t know that either.
‘Perhaps, nothing. Perhaps, everything,’ he said, after a moment of trans-continental static over the phone.
I blinked. ‘You’ll still have to plan the first leg, won’t you?’
‘Oh, yes. That I’ll do. Spain, most probably. But I’m also looking at India. There are options. I’ll have to plan,” after a short silence, he said, ‘err, in the short term, at least.’
And there was that word, again.
Even those who’ve decided to not make life-long plans still have to do some grind to sort out the immediate future.
I smiled to myself and immediately felt guilty. Was I envious? It’s not like I lived a very planned life but the thought of picking up my backpack and going away for a year gives me anxiety. I like hotel reservations as much as the next urbanite and my passport demands I obtain authentication in advance.
Turns out, not planning your life, is a privilege few can afford.
At this point, I have to work to earn my living and to secure my future. I’m married and look after an independent household. My husband and I both run individual law practices. That means we can’t move cities if the fancy takes us. We also own property where we live which grounds us even more.
Nothing I’ve said above goes to imply that this shall be our status quo forever. Life is twisted and one of us might drop off any moment. Or we might suddenly get overwhelmed with the desire to become travelling jugglers.
On the contrary, perhaps, my future-traveler friend may need to settle down and pick it back again at some point when the money dips or the heart withers.
Despite the eternal confusion, here’s what I’ve realised about plans.
It makes sense to exchange plans with purpose.
I didn’t plan to marry my husband when we met. We bonded as friends first and realised along the way that we could be much more. It just happened that the odds worked in our favor. I even remember captioning our weeding photograph on Facebook— ‘things never happen like you imagine they will’.
Our businesses have grown with hard work but also with a good run of luck. Unlike many other independent professionals, we continued to earn well during COVID. And we gave to those who didn’t because we knew it was just that the Goddess Fortune wasn’t favoring them then.
On the other hand, my writing journey hasn’t taken off the way I’d meticulously planned. I’m still struggling to get my current manuscript accepted. The money still only trickles in every now and then. Neither of my books are published by Tier 1 publishers.
But here’s where purpose saves me.
I am in love with writing stories and editing books. It occupies me and motivates me like nothing else. When you work with purpose, there are some rewards along the way. Both books are published at no charge and one of them bagged the finalist for the Amazon Pen To Publish award 2022.
All of this happened without any foresight but with writing with my heart and constantly working on my craft.
What I’m learning is that perhaps, we don’t need the exact course of our journey chartered. We just need to have our north stars in place so that when it’s all dark and lonely, we know which way to crane our heads when we look up.
It’s true that the plans we make don’t really go our way.
But when we persevere with purpose, we arrive at a greater reward: meaning.
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