Plan to Not Plan

            John Lennon once sang, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” So, mathematicians, is life a function of plans or are plans a function of life? For those of you that believe in predestination, Lennon’s quote is irrelevant. Regardless of what plans you make for the next day, everything that will occur has already been planned. And doesn’t everything just happen for a reason? The more I repeat that cliché, the more I find myself believing in predestination. But alas, I am still a Type A control freak. When things spin out of control I reach for the reigns and try my best to harness life in its entirety.

            There are short-term plans (e.g. I just need to get through this day); there are long-term plans (e.g. I’ll do whatever it takes to get me through this year).  Sometimes you follow through with your plans while other times you cancel your plans and plan to plan your plans again. You may dinner plans, you make lesson plans, you make wedding plans. And when you aren’t planning your time outside of the workplace, you plan your schedule inside your cubicle. Life becomes compartmentalized into blocks of plans fashioned into increments of time. We run out of time to finish our plans and realize that our plans do not fit into the hours of the day. And so we try to re-plan our day so that we can manipulate the hours of the day. We try to fool the hours, but ultimately, we end up only fooling ourselves.

            The idea of making plans surfaces as I try to maintain the work-life balance. For instance, every Tuesday evening I plan to attend conversion class. On the weekends, I plan to clean and to shop for groceries. But most importantly, I plan to spend time with friends. But plans are derailed by exhaustion or unexpected errands. You find yourself realizing that the only definite plans you can keep revolve around going to work and going to sleep and waking up. You find that you can set all the other things on the back burner and let them simmer until your first free day. Eventually though, all the things that are left incomplete or undone catch up to you. You have lost your balance and are either teetering on the type rope or tumbling onto the floor.

            Sometimes we go through life believing that we must make certain sacrifices in order to accommodate specific plans. We stay at work late because if we do not we will not make a deadline, not make our bosses happy, and perhaps, not have a job. We micromanage our plans so that sometimes we find ourselves doing things half-heartedly or just half-assed. However, we blame errors on ourselves and charge it to the fact that we do not know how to balance work with life. We settle, and we believe that unless we give up book club, wine club or fight club we cannot maintain our balance on the type rope, we cannot make the scale even.

            In reality, work and life can and do coexist. But as much as you plan to balance both, you may come up short. There is no punishment for tipping the scales or falling off the type rope – save a few bruises. Some weeks work wins while other weeks life prevails. However, where we win is when we realize life is passing or floating by when we are caught up in the planning. So let go.

            For those of you that are like me and monopolize every moment, fool yourself into planning time to let go. At first, it will be difficult to not possess each minute. You will feel like you are wasting time, but eventually, you will recognize that although every moment does not need an intention, it can be enjoyed. So spend the extra time with him or her, walk slower to your car in order to enjoy the remaining days of summer, or sip the second glass of wine and stay late. After all, it was also Lennon that said: “Time you enjoy wasting was not wasted.”