Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, I once knew everything. I was a teenager in high school and the world seemed so simple and easy. Years (and years) have gone by and I’ve had some life experience and matured a bit and learned how naive I was. And now, years later (again), I’m realizing that I may not have known it all, but what I did know was pretty solid.
When I was a teenager I had a very strict anti-plan rule. Intentions and proposals were okay, but plans were straight out. Now that may sound foolish or make me sound like some kind of party girl, but my reasons were really just that I didn’t want to get locked onto any specific path – I wanted to leave things open ended so I could maintain some flexibility and spontaneity.
Since then I’ve become somewhat of a plan-aholic. I need to know when everything is going to happen, how it’s going to happen, and what I’m going to do when it’s going to happen. If I don’t know what’s going to happen, I become very anxious and upset – I start coming up with all these ‘what if’ scenarios… and then making a plan for how to deal with them. For a long time, I figured this was just the Virgoness in me (and it may well be) and that I was just well prepared.
But now I realize something different – I was limiting myself. Instead of allowing life to unfold in an organic and wild way, I was hedging it, controlling it, trimming it, shaping it, and… even killing it with all my ministrations. By coming up with a plan and deciding how my future would go, I was eliminating possibilities – some that could have been WAY better than my plan.
I realized this because I was thinking about how, when I was younger, everything always seemed to line up just so in ways I could never predict, but everything was always taken care of, often better than I had hoped. And now it seems like nothing EVER goes the way I want it to – and then I realized: I was too married to my plans to allow luck, happiness, good fortune, karma, etc. to do their thing. I was concentrating too much on the road before me and not paying any attention to the scenery – or opportunities.
So, now I’m going to regress. No more plans for me – I’m just going to wing it. I can have hopes, intentions and desires, but no plans anymore. I am going to leave my life open to the opportunities that come along and I’m going to stay flexible enough to take them when I want to. Plans begone!
