The Planning Stage

I was busy stacking firewood with Laurae this afternoon and then we tackled the run-away tomato plant in the patio area. Gone! We picked some late falling walnuts and now it’s getting colder and cloudier every minute. Could be raining soon and a fire would be nice.

So what am I getting at? Well, I was reading my granddaughters blog the other day and she was bemoaning the fact that life wasn’t following her plan; or she didn’t have a plan that looked anything at all like her life. And so I was thinking about that as I picked through the walnuts and stacked the firewood. How did we get to this place in our lives? Why are we in Orland in the year 2006? Is this what we planned? Those were good questions and it started me thinking about my own life plans, back when I was ready to leave my parent’s house.

Some of those plans are already recounted earlier in this blog and so if you have read it, I don’t have to tell you that my plans were; shall we say, tenuous?

As a child I wanted to be a veterinarian, a cowboy, a fireman and a host of others. But none of those dreams made it past my freshman year of high school. That was when I realized that I had to be SERIOUS about my career. If I didn’t get it at first, my career counselor made it very clear at our second meeting. But getting it and doing it were two very different things. And I left high school without a plan.

Then there was a semester of Junior College…which I hated! It was boring and my classes were boring; life was boring. So I joined the Navy because I was bored. What kind of a plan is that?

After the Navy, I had some vague plans. Go back to school and make something of myself. I was admitted to Cal Poly and then proceeded to party; wasting a semester of life preparation. No plan there.

To make a long story short, our life has been short of well executed plans. They may have been well thought out and brilliantly detailed, but when things happened in our lives, we made corrections in our course and sailed on; oblivious to our destination or even a need for one. Not the wisest way to travel! But it seemed to fit us…

Luckily, we humans are blessed with much resilience and a natural optimism. We may fail at something and see our dreams evaporate, but we generally pick ourselves up and motor on, building a new dream as we go. Then we tell ourselves that this new dream is better anyway; much better than the last one.

I think I see a theme here; plans aren’t made…plans happen.