To a Blogger

We all make plans. Some more than others, but every person does it. Whether it's what to eat, where we're going, or what we want for the rest of our lives, we all do it. The unfortunate downfall to our inability to be 100% spontaneous is we're constantly at risk for failure. The plans we make are vulnerable to variables we do not even consider nor can we control. Some plan on staying in a certain place for an extended period of time then an event unexpected happens and even the best, most thought out plans fail.

I am not trying to qualify Robert Burns' line from “To a Mouse” ( “the best laid schemes o' mice an' men, gang aft agley”) I am letting my life's experiences do the typing. I can plan to graduate college and pursue a job after the fact, perhaps get married somewhere down the road and have a family. Unfortunately, events in life can make that perfect plan of graduating, getting married, and holding a career can skew it so far from ever being carried out the way we hoped. They are so vulnerable to the unplanned events that when our plans do fail we feel as failures. We can do a few things to counter-act this, we can understand that if we make plans that we will fail at them from the get-go, this is a very skeptical way of dealing with it, but it works. However I think the best way of dealing with it is to stop planning the minute and and only plan on the bigger milestones and not to date them. I may now plan on graduating from college within four years, but something may happen that prevents me from doing that, instead I should plan on graduating from college. Turn plans into goals.

I discussed the weighty plans, the plans that effect life's direction. There are other types of plans that are in need of addressing. The small plans we make daily, that also, are pretty much doomed to failure. My goal the other day was to make myself a sandwich, however the cheese I wanted on it was not available. I planned on having that cheese, but life kicked my ass again and disallowed me from having my sandwich the way I planned. My sister planned on taking a trip to Anaheim with a friend Thursday night, but circumstances (another car rubbing paint with theirs) prevented their plans from being completed in the ideal way. They went to Anaheim a day later, did they fail at their plans? Hell yeah they did. One could argue since they didn't make it to Anaheim on Thursday they automatically failed. Or maybe they didn't since they made it to Anaheim eventually. The point of this was to show that even the best laid plans can go awry. (I thought I planned on not qualifying that... fuck)

We will make plans and they will need to be changed, I think the best we can do is try to make them as dynamic as possible. Don't dwell on the failures, celebrate the successes and enjoy the company.