Don’t Let Planning Get in the Way of Living!
I am a planner. Some would call this being a control freak and on many days, I might be inclined to agree with them. I come from a long line of planners, most evident being my mother, who went to her passage with notebooks full of ideas and unfinished dreams near her side. I too have such notebooks, and if I’m not writing plans out there, I admit to having a dry eraser board tucked in the corner of my office for those moments when I need to see my grandiose ideas drawn out on multicolored mind map diagrams. I actually never knew what a mind map was until my daughter had to draw one for a middle school project. I was smitten. What a way to dream. What a way to plan!
I’ve noticed that my daughter is filling up her own notebooks with ideas and plans. Interesting how our three generations are similar yet different. My mother preferred the .69-cent drugstore wide-ruled spiral classics. I am partial to Moleskin tablets with accordion pockets in the back. My daughter drops mini notebooks in her purse, or index cards in her back pocket where she calculates the pros and cons of life decisions such as staying or leaving a boring but sometimes beneficial part time job. She got this from me. I clearly remember a decade ago when I contemplated moving to the South and starting a new path. We sat a dry eraser board up on the mantle and on the left wrote pros, and on the right, the cons. The pros won out.
The thing about being so specific about planning, dreaming, and idea hoarding is that somewhere along the line, flexibility inevitably smashes up against you. It is a challenge to be admittedly anal about planning, but fluid in the creation and acceptance of change. Especially when dealing with this loss of control comes in the form of a plan crashed and burned in a pile before you. This is why it is important to be able to understand the difference in goals and plans. Goals can be short term or long, but they encapsulate achievement. Whether it’s about what you want out of your life or about the need to have an experience—this part does not matter. What matters is that you see the goal as the fruition of a portion of your overall journey. A plan then, is how this goal can be achieved. If you keep the two connected by a flexible thread that reflects your ability to change plans if needed to achieve a prescribed goal, your journey will be a more flexible one where you are able to go with the ebb and flow of change in your life.
My goals revolve around freedom, and the crux of this in a capitalist world is that I must earn a living at the same time. For me, freedom means not punching a traditional time clock, having boatloads of introspective time in order to fill up the aforementioned Moleskin notebooks, and having the space to travel and explore my world—all of course while earning a living. This sounds like the life of someone on the Travel Channel, and I would love to be someone so fortunate. My fortune and my plans to support these goals currently involve teaching online, selling Trikkes, developing web ventures, and working on creating new paths. Still, a few months ago, I got caught up in the promise of a gift. Such a special gift, and one that would allow me to take some time off from all of my planning and just simply enjoy my goals. In other words, everyday I believed I worked for the goal. This gift held the promise that maybe the planning wouldn’t be so crucial anymore. I was thankful for this because I really had grown weary of planning.
Now I am a responsible person, and even though I was “plan weary,” this gift too had to be planned as to how it would be utilized. Notebooks filled with those ideas on the regular. I allowed myself to dream in a way that was different than the dreams that I held before in prior notebooks. These new dreams were one-sentence affirmative bombshells. “I’m going to _____” and that was that. No plan needed. What a relief to not have to write, “I want to do _____” and follow it with a pyramid of steps required to reach the precipice, each marker laden with its own set of steps tucked within.
Well the gift did come, but not as I assumed it would. In other words, not as I planned! I was crushed for quite a while. Depressed actually. I wasn’t sure if it was because I had allowed myself to dream in a different way, or because I had no plan for this perceived setback. Either way, it wasn’t until I unconsciously reached for my notebook many days into my doldrums, that I realized that my goals were still there undamaged, just waiting for me to see and appreciate them. I realized that my belief that I was working and planning each day for these goals was flawed and was keeping me from living what I had already accomplished. I realized that I am living my goals. The wise choice for me from that day forward, perhaps one my mother never realized, and one that I must instill in my daughter, is that goals are often already achieved, and notebooks should be used to record the experience of living them.
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