Plan B
About a month ago, I decided the date of my last day of work. Seriously. When I texted my spouse about it, I meant it completely and sincerely. How we got there doesn’t matter, suffice it to say I was tired, fed up, frustrated, overwhelmed and feeling pretty despondent that anything could change for the better. I doubled down on it by telling my witchy inner circle. I meant what I said and I said what I meant, until I didn’t (and gosh am I grateful for the folks who hold these things loosely and love me all the same).
I’ve been certain of many things in my life, right up until the moment I wasn’t. I think now that this is the way life’s meant to be experienced, rather than a well made blue-print from which there are no deviations. This revelation possibly feels more profound than it should at the ripe old age of fifty. Unfortunately, I’ve often been my own source of suffering by railing about the ways my life should be simply because that’s what I planned. All the way back to grade school I was the first person done with any test. I know what I know and I know what I don’t, and I never waste time dinking around with answers that don’t come easily.
Unfortunately, in my experience, you can thrive pretty well in academia with this attitude. Real life however, isn’t nearly so cut and dry.
If you had asked me five years ago where I saw my life headed, Milledgeville wouldn’t be in the picture. I would still have breasts, and would not have sat through chemo again, not even in my worst nightmares. I couldn’t have imagined I would run board meetings and apply for grants and sit on building committees. That I would excel at it and enjoy it. I wouldn’t have imagined going back to school, not even short term. I wouldn’t have dared to call myself a pagan or an agnostic. Or understood how deeply entrenched in parenting I would still be with adult children. I would have more time, more puppies and a bigger garden.
I had plans, you see, and heaven help the person or circumstance that blocked my path.
This sounds like a great deal of naivete to have at forty-five, or forty, or thirty-five - or ever, really. But I do think many of us live just this way for a long time, even our whole lives, believing that life owes us the ease of going the way we want it to because we jump through all the right hoops and pay our taxes on time. Because someone told us that four years of college and a job with benefits would be enough to protect us from any curveballs that come our way. Or at least, that’s the package I thought I paid for.
One of the skills I use at work quite often, more often than I would have thought possible, is the ability to change plans suddenly using only the people or resources I have on hand. Honestly, I’m good at it. It’s like knocking a puzzle completely out of whack and suddenly reassembling it in an entirely different way, but still seeing mostly the same picture. It’s a creative flex I enjoy, but only when I surrender to it instead of desperately trying to make the pieces fit the way that’s shown on the box cover. It’s great when it works like that, but life is usually way messier than your average 1,000 piece puzzle.
It feels like the last six months have been some sort of marathon of disassembling and reassembling parts and plans over and over and over again. My soul is worn from pivoting, planning, hoping and expecting, only to have the pieces knocked out of place and start again from scratch. It’s hard. It’s so hard. And we, all of us, do it, over and over again. Which is quite amazing, really, one of the more miraculous elements of being fully human.
It’s also why a month after naming the day when I planned to drop everything and walk into a new plan, instead I really am going back to school, for a short time, and making yard improvement plans at my home in Milledgeville, and figuring out how to make the most important pieces fit without losing my mind altogether.
I had a plan. And now I have plan B, which is a good enough plan for as long as it lasts, and then we’ll come up with a new one. Not better, just different. Over and over again.