REGISTER

I’ve Got a Plan

If an enlightened person draws out the plan for a prison on the ground, why can’t they get out?

—Xutang’s Three Questions, Entangling Vines, Case 143

At sixty-nine years of age the National Institutes of Health considers me “young-old.” If I lived in Japan, I’d be “pre-old,” and LinkedIn considers me to be middle-aged until age seventy-five. What I know is that I have lived enough life to know that things do not go as planned. Almost never.

For instance, say I decide to go to the store fifteen minutes before it closes: I set my GPS, find the fastest route and set out. I should be able to get there in five minutes, leaving me ten minutes to shop. That’s a plan. However, as I am driving to the store I get stuck in traffic, a semi has driven off the road and the police send me on a detour. I get a little lost and arrive at the store five minutes before closing. As I walk up to the door there is a handwritten sign saying they had to close early because the store owner had to attend to some urgent business at home.

“… the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”

That one line is from a poem by Robert Burns. In it, Burns tells the story of a mouse who prepares for winter by making a nest in a field. A farmer comes along and accidentally destroys it while plowing the field. The mouse scolds the farmer, who apologizes by saying, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” Indeed.

A plan is an attempt to project a desired outcome into an unknown and uncertain future. It doesn’t work out like that. Ask the municipal planner. Her nightmare is the water project outside of town that comes in two years late and fifty million over budget. Plans do not work out.

When I hold fast, white knuckled, onto my plan and it doesn’t work out and I don’t let go of the plan, it is like a prison. No longer am I responsible, able to respond to life as it comes. I suffer as I perceive that life is not working out the way I want.

Why hold on to that fiction?

—David Parks