My vacation to India totally did not turn out as expected. I don’t mean this in a positive or negative way, just..unexpected.
Some stuff went as planned. I expected to meet my friends, party hard, have a great time, eat great home cooked food and just revel in the pleasure that is Bombay. All of that happened, and then some.
I did not expect to get bronchitis, have my passport stuck at the US Consulate and be wedding shopping for clothes and jewellery. It just feels….weird. This was not the plan.
Which got me thinking, what is it about the unexpected that makes people freak out? I have noticed both from personal experience as well as from the experience of others around me that people tend to take bad news well as long as they expect it. But they don’t handle any news – good or bad – with grace if it comes out of the blue. Is it because we are so hung up on a “master plan” ? Almost all of us make elaborate plans for life that is so dependent on things going according to the plan. We do make back up plans but even that depends on something else falling into place. We get disappointed when things don’t go our way, but we continue making plans and hope that next time will be different. Does that make us stupid or hopeful?
Maybe we continue making plans because we are so afraid to live life without one. I am curious to see what will happen if I just stop planning and just …live. I am afraid that things will be totally different. Or maybe I am just afraid that things won’t be all that different and I will just realize how little difference the planning really makes!
Or maybe I just have a lot of spare time and let my mind wander too far. It's time to plan the rest of my day :)
Some stuff went as planned. I expected to meet my friends, party hard, have a great time, eat great home cooked food and just revel in the pleasure that is Bombay. All of that happened, and then some.
I did not expect to get bronchitis, have my passport stuck at the US Consulate and be wedding shopping for clothes and jewellery. It just feels….weird. This was not the plan.
Which got me thinking, what is it about the unexpected that makes people freak out? I have noticed both from personal experience as well as from the experience of others around me that people tend to take bad news well as long as they expect it. But they don’t handle any news – good or bad – with grace if it comes out of the blue. Is it because we are so hung up on a “master plan” ? Almost all of us make elaborate plans for life that is so dependent on things going according to the plan. We do make back up plans but even that depends on something else falling into place. We get disappointed when things don’t go our way, but we continue making plans and hope that next time will be different. Does that make us stupid or hopeful?
Maybe we continue making plans because we are so afraid to live life without one. I am curious to see what will happen if I just stop planning and just …live. I am afraid that things will be totally different. Or maybe I am just afraid that things won’t be all that different and I will just realize how little difference the planning really makes!
Or maybe I just have a lot of spare time and let my mind wander too far. It's time to plan the rest of my day :)
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