Could it be because life has a better plan?
[Day 29 of #30dayschallenge]
What a year 2020 has been.
It charted its own course and pushed aside everyone’s plans.
So what do you do when things don’t go to plan?
Changing plans would be a good place to start.
But humans are a funny mob — we like to be in control.
Or more accurately, we like to think that we are in control.
Many of our stresses would disappear if we could accept the reality that we were never in control.
A Rejection Note
I received a rejection note for an article that I wrote on Day 18 of my #30daychallenge to a Medium publication — The Gift of Being Alive.
I wrote about my experience helping out a friend test out a prototype that he’s developing. At the time, it hasn’t been launched yet.
And now it has and it is called Dark Talk Time, an arts project funded by City of Melbourne’s COVID-19 arts grants, which connects pairs of strangers for hosted phone conversations.
At the time when I wrote about my experience, their website/project hadn’t officially launched yet.
And now it is — and it’s running through till 13 September this year.
So even though it didn’t go to plan, it actually did.
USA Road Trip
At the end of my expatriate assignment in Hong Kong, I was discussing my return date to Australia with a new boss.
The vibe that I got wasn’t positive and there’s no suitable roles — but it may open up later in the year.
We’d kept in touch with a few families whose kids were classmates with my son and daughter from kindergarten, and heard about one family taking a term off to travel around Australia in a campervan.
I also had a dilemma as my kids were ahead by 6 months with their schooling.
My son had just completed his first year of high school in Hong Kong and was heading into summer holidays. If we went back to Australia as planned (July 2013), he’d be going backwards — into the final year of primary school.
I was chatting to an Australian colleague and found out that in Victoria I could take long service leave after 7 years of continuous service, not 10 years like other states. And I happened to just meet that threshold.
So we ended up taking a few months to travel around the USA before coming back to Australia.
We spent 74 days on the road and travelled 13,260 miles/21,340 kilometres across 32 states in the United States (plus a day trip to Vancouver).
It was an epic adventure —that I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world.
And only possible because things didn’t go to plan.
Going With Life’s Flow
I could share many more similar stories.
Some of them pushed me and my family to near-breaking point.
But we never broke.
Though I’ve had to learn not fight so hard.
It’s futile to fight with reality — because I’ve already lost.
It’s much less effort to go with the flow and change my plan so that it aligns with wherever life is leading me.
Sometimes when my plans are disrupted, it might not seem that life is working for me.
But that’s only temporary.
Usually it’s afterwards, sometimes years later, when I connect the dots backwards, that I realised how every twist and turn served a purpose.
I’ve learnt to welcome the times when things don’t go to plan — because I know it’s always because that life has a better plan.
Life is always guiding me towards where I needed to be.
And I trust life, more than I trust me.
Thank you for reading through to the end of this post.
I don’t know who you are or what circumstances you may be in at this moment.
But like many around the world, you are probably affected by COVID-19 and whatever you planned for 2020 didn’t pan out.
I hope, like me, you can come to see that maybe it’s possible that things are going to plan, even when it feels like it’s not.
Maybe when things don’t go to plan, it’s because life has a better plan.
No matter how bad things seem, let’s not let it break us.
No matter how daunting the challenges ahead seem, let’s not let it break us.
Let’s pick ourselves up and do whatever it takes.
Let’s get it done. Together.
