We Make Plans

Everyone makes plans. Plans for life, plans for the year, plans for the next day, plans for the next hour. We all have plans. Even now.
In about fifteen minutes I plan on picking my mom up from work. Tomorrow, I plan on seeing my older sister. Next week I plan on flying back to college. This year I plan on getting good grades in school. In two years from now I plan on graduating and getting a job. Several more years after that, I plan on marrying and having kids. I have plans for my life. Everyone does.

And there's nothing wrong with having plans. Plans are good, they give us a goal, a place to go in life. The problem comes when things don't go according to plan. Which happens every day.
This morning, I planned on sleeping in until ten, because it's Summer vacation, and I usually have to wake up really early on Monday mornings. Of course, I told my mom, my sister, and my friends, "I'm going to sleep until ten on a Monday morning!" And, of course, I didn't.
At 8:36 AM, a horde of little siblings came charging through the halls outside my bedroom, screaming and shouting. But they didn't just run by once, they ran by several times, and then stopped outside my door, still screaming.
And that was the end of that. My plans for the morning were ruined. There was no way I was going to sleep anymore. My plan had failed.

Why do plans fail? Why can't things just always happen exactly how we want them to? Why is it that every time we try to do anything, we always end up disappointed? There are probably several reasons for this. Maybe there are millions, I don't know. Let me list some of my most common plan-eaters.

Number One: the plan wasn't very good in the first place. Maybe you were planning on driving off a cliff hoping the car would fly you to the other side safely. Bad plan. Maybe you were thinking about making a watermelon and cantaloupe smoothie. Depending on how you went about this, that could be a very bad plan. Trust me, I've tried.

Number Two: the plan was not planned out. Maybe you were going to drive off that cliff believing you had wings attached to your car, but had forgotten that you'd taken the wings off that morning to get them cleaned. Normally, in this case, driving off a cliff and hoping to fly would be perfectly alright, but you didn't plan the plan well enough to keep the wings on that day. Or maybe you were actually going to make a strawberry-banana smoothie, but all you had were watermelon and cantaloupe. It's your lack of planning that made your plan turn into a big, watery mess.

Number Three: Something unexpected happens. This is the one that we want to blame all our problems on. "It wasn't my fault!" or "How was I supposed to know?" are just excuses for our own shortcomings. At least, they are most of the time. There are times, however, where you have the wings on your car, you drive off the cliff, you're flying along, and suddenly an eagle comes out and attacks your wings and makes you fall to your death. Or, you've found a way to make a watermelon and cantaloupe smoothie without making a huge, watery mess and suddenly, your blender breaks.

So, basically, our plans fail. Repeatedly. Sometimes we can do something about it, sometimes we can't. We can make good plans, plan them carefully, and account for a million different possibilities. But, still, things can go terribly awry, and that's okay.

Without our plans going wrong, life would be terribly boring. If everything happened exactly how we wanted it to, the future would hold no value. If we got to do everything in life exactly how we want and when we want, we would be extremely boring people. Thank goodness life takes our plans and turns them upside down. Our lives stay interesting because they're unpredictable.