Life Doesn’t Always Follow the Plan

We like to fool ourselves into thinking our lives can be planned and will unfold like a carefully drawn map.

We plan our careers, set goals for family life, imagine the house we will live in someday, and picture what we will do when we retire.

Yep, planning feels good.

It gives us a sense of control and security.

After all, when we have a roadmap, we feel like we know where we are going and what comes next.

You’ve all heard it before:

“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

The old line that bankrolled a thousand consultants.

But if you live long enough, you eventually realize something simple.

Life is not beholden to your plans and rarely follows the map.

No matter how carefully we plan, how detailed our calendars become, or how organized our intentions are, life has a way of shaking things up.

Plans change.

Schedules slip.

Opportunities come and go, and rarely in the way we expect.

Sometimes those disruptions are frustrating.

Often, they are painful.

Other times they send us down roads we never intended to travel.

But they are also simply part of being alive.

Over the past few weeks, I found myself rolling something around mentally.

There has been a lot going on, but little things kept interrupting the neat little plans I had laid out.

Nothing dramatic.

Just small delays, small shifts in schedule, and small adjustments that pushed the days in slightly different directions than I had imagined.

Individually, they weren’t much.

But after a few of them in a row, I started to notice a pattern.

The accumulation of effects.

A pattern that, of course, I had seen before.

One that, for me, has often been a source of irritation.

Then this morning I had to drive to the airport.

Family was flying in to spend the week with us, so the house was about to be full, and the logistician in me had worked the schedule out perfectly.

The plane was scheduled to land at 9:00 a.m.

I’d arrive right around the same time, park in the free one-hour parking, meet them at baggage claim, and we’d be on our way home in time for an early lunch.

Simple.

Clean.

Efficient.

Should be easy.

I arrived right on time.

Parked.

Headed into the airport, they would be there any minute.

Then the arrival board changed.

9:00 became 9:15.

Then 9:45.

Then eventually 10:45.

Sitting there in the airport, watching those numbers change again and again, I felt the familiar little spark of irritation that comes when a carefully planned morning isn’t unfolding the way we expected.

Ok, yes… if I’m being honest, it was more like a virtual forest fire than a spark.

Can nothing go as planned?

Why do we even try to schedule anything?

And then I caught myself.

The whole reason I was there was to pick up family.

They were experiencing this delay from their end as well.

These are people I love very much, who were coming to spend their most precious resource with us.

Time.

All of a sudden, the delay didn’t really matter.

All that mattered was their safe arrival.

In fact, it gave me time to sit there quietly and think about something that had been floating around in my head for a few days.

Life rarely follows the plan.

Not once.

Not occasionally.

Almost never.

I sometimes think life laughs a little every time we pat ourselves on the back for our well-laid plans.

Over the course of a lifetime, our paths are constantly redirected by things outside our control.

Decisions made by other people.

Weather that rolls in unexpectedly.

Opportunities we never saw coming.

Problems we didn’t anticipate.

Moments of luck.

Moments of hardship.

Every life is shaped by thousands of these small turns.

When I look back over the years, I can see countless moments where the plan changed.

Some of those moments were frustrating at the time.

Some were difficult.

A few were painful.

But many of them, in hindsight, turned out to be exactly the turns that led me to where I needed to be.

Paths that seemed inconvenient at the time became foundations for things I would never have built otherwise.

Places I never planned to go turned out to be places I’m grateful I visited.

Opportunities I never would have chosen became some of the most meaningful parts of my life.

That realization brings with it a quiet understanding.

It isn’t just my life.

Yes, I live it.

But it is shared.

None of us are truly solo in our existence.

Every decision we make intersects with the lives of others.

Their decisions, their circumstances, their plans, and their unexpected detours all weave into the same fabric of our lives.

None of us move through life alone.

When you begin to see life that way, something interesting happens.

The frustration that comes from disrupted plans softens a little.

You start to realize that many of the interruptions that push you off course are simply the result of living in a shared world.

A world where other people’s lives intersect with yours every single day.

And often, those intersections are exactly where the meaning lives.

Family.

Friends.

The people we care about.

Those are the real destinations, not the carefully timed schedules we write down on our calendars.

Looking back, I can see that life has surprised me in countless ways.

Not always in pleasant ways.

Not always in painful ones either.

But very often in ways that, over time, worked themselves out.

We learn things we didn’t know we needed to learn.

We gain things we didn’t know we were missing.

Sometimes we even lose things that, in hindsight, we were better off without, even if we didn’t see it that way at the time.

Often, we make what feels like a down payment of tears today… only to realize later that it was really a down payment on happiness.

Life has a strange way of shaping us through the very detours we try so hard to avoid.

These days I find myself planning a little less.

And sharing my life a little more.

And oddly enough…

things seem to be smoothing out.

I wrote this Knowing how truly blessed I am!

Buy Glen a coffee or a beer

If this resonated with you, hit follow and sign up so you’ll get the next post.

Give one of these a read next!

Time Comes Collecting

The Slow Thinning of Shared Life

Listening to the Unknown: Embracing the Journey of Uncertainty

Consider buying a coffee to help support the site. And reach out if you want help with resumes, research, or sharpening your interview skills, or just to touch base!

Off the map