One Year at a Time

When I was younger I was a pretty good planner. I had goals and dreams and plenty of ambition. And I worked in the technology field so I knew all about planning. How to define tasks and milestones and identify dependencies and evaluate risks and determine resource needs and manage the critical path and so on. I could spend a few hours filling in project management worksheets and print out the rest of my life as a nice, tidy Gantt chart. Of course, it wasn't always easy predicting how my life would unfold, but that's why mankind invented contingency plans, right?

But what I didn't do very well back then was to track my actual progress against the plans that I made. Yes, I could dream about my future and come up with a brilliant plan that covered all the angles. But then I'd just set the plan aside and go about my life, convinced that I was now prepared for whatever came my way. I never looked back at my old plans to see how well I'd predicted the future. I only came up with new plans, and then convinced myself that my future was under control.

It took me several years, and lots of failed plans, to finally realize that trying to plan out my life was a fool's errand. They say that "life turns on a dime". Well, dimes are pretty small, and I think they're right. Looking back over my life and all the things I tried to plan, all those big things like marriage and children and jobs and homes and retirement and so on, it's now clear to me that life simply happens, regardless of how much we try to execute our plans.

One day not so long ago, I tried to figure out just how far ahead I could plan my life. I listed some of the major events in my life, like getting married, having children, changing jobs, moving to different states, buy and selling houses, ending my marriage, and so on, and I thought about whether I could have planned any of them. In every case, I couldn't see the event coming more than a year ahead. One year I was single, and the next I was married. One year no children, and the next a son. A few years more, and a daughter, then another daughter. I moved from Michigan to Texas, then to Virginia, and never saw those moves coming, either. I woke up one day and my marriage of 33 years was over, and a few months ago I was informed that my job of 25 years was at risk. All big events, and all unplanned. And I'm now convinced, all unplannable.

So I just stopped making plans. Well, not exactly. I still try to plan a year ahead. It took me awhile to stop looking so far into the future and to just live one year at a time, but now that I do I really enjoy it. Friends sometimes ask me things like, "Are you going to retire soon? What if you lose your job? What would you do?" I tell them that I have no plans, and that I just deal with things as they come.

Before I became comfortable living a year at a time, I first had to learn to let go. I had to acknowledge that my prior attempts at long-term planning didn't really work for me anyway, and that it was okay to just let go and trust. To have faith that the world would always have a place for me. And now that I view the world this way, my faith has strengthened accordingly.

I only plan a year at a time now, which means I don't really do much planning at all, but hey, I still do some! And every April, I plan my next year of tent living. That's because I pay my rent a year in advance, and April is "rent month". So later this week, I'll be paying another year's rent.

So if things work out according to plan, I'll be living in my tent in Brandy Station for another year. After that...?