What Matters to Us: The Best Laid Plans

Things change. We all know this, sort of.  Any yet, we move through our days with a level of certainty about how it will all play out.   Focused young people will sketch out their life’s map – areas of study, degrees to be received, and positions to be secured as a result.  Lovers see their unborn children in each other’s eyes.  The joint furniture is being arranged in the mind’s eye of the steady Saturday night date.  We enter into this dance without invitation.  It is expected, normal even.  When a child is born its parents create stories of who it will become and most likely the stories will be happy ones.  Teenagers fantasize about their independent lives once freed from the controls of the family.  The perfect house is searched for and found and finally a sense of permanence and safety takes up residence.  We march along into middle age and then old age with expectations in our knapsacks, the final one being that we will die peacefully in our sleep after a very long and productive life.

Maybe that is why, when the disappointments come, and they do come, we are so stunned.  The babies grow to be their own version of the parents’ story and the interpretations may be quite different.  But whose story is it anyway?  The focused student finds herself stumbling, struggling for the first time.  She is worrying about failure and is reinventing her self-image.  The young adult is now free of the constraints of a parent-run household and begins to get an inkling of the difficulty of self-sustainment.  There may even be some anger about how unfair this seems, maybe a need to place blame.  The new home may have become an anchor in both a good and bad sense, creating stability but possibly losing value in a downward spiraling market and now holding its inhabitants in place amidst rapidly rising waters of financial difficulty.  And the last chapters of life are up for grabs when it comes to predictions.  Carpe diem seems appropriate.

This sounds pretty negative.  But it does speak to the Buddhist assertion that attachment results in suffering.  But aren’t we supposed to be attached?  In psychological terms a secure attachment bodes well for the future.  If we don’t allow ourselves to attach to others we feel diminished, no matter how good our work is going.  So how is this supposed to work?

Maybe we first need to figure out what is really important.  Attaching ourselves to our values seems like a good plan.  How that all plays out is another thing entirely.  We may move toward something or someone that feels right only to discover that the landscape has changed, the compass is moving in strange directions.  It is at that time that I think we need to step back and look again.  Becoming creative, thinking outside the box becomes the new compass.  If we look at the natural world, everything, is born, goes through seasons and dies.  Every element of nature is affected by every other element.  We cannot control this, but we have choices.  We can change directions, and sometimes we must if we are to move forward in our lives.  The river is always moving and if we find ourselves stranded on a rock trying to stop the river we will get nowhere.  Learning how to move with the river takes less energy and in the end you find yourself somewhere new, maybe even somewhere better.  Maybe the saying “Go with the flow” needs resurgence these days. 

There are reasons why so many people are feeling stressed and disappointed with their lives.  We are disconnected from one another.  Families are strewn across the country or even the world.  For many, work has become their life partner.  But no one to my knowledge has on his or her gravestone, “Here lies__________, beloved programmer, lawyer, or marketer." It is in the sharing of relationships that we find ourselves and leave our legacy.  The road we travel to get to the destination is not as important as what we bring of ourselves and share with others.  The accumulation of things doesn’t seem to add to happiness, nor does the size of one’s home or alma mater.  Recently an excerpt from a blog written by a hospice nurse who has spend final moments for 20 years with all kinds of people has gone viral.  That is inspiring to me because the message is very important.  It lists the 5 regrets of dying people.  I will finish my writing here with that article and send it along with my wish for anyone reading this that you take a moment in your very busy day to re-think what is important in your life and invent Plan B if the time is right, or even Plan C.

Regrets of the Dying

Interview with Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People,  about his book. Overcoming Life’s Disappointments