On Planning

“If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.”

I always had a plan. People without one drove me up the wall. I mapped out literally everything — from the big goals down to the smallest details: what exactly I’d do, in what order, how long it would take. Sometimes the plans came true, sometimes they fell apart at the seams. And every time, I suffered from the gap between what I expected and what actually happened.

And now, in my forty-second year, I’ve arrived at a strange, unfamiliar state. I have clear images of the life I want to live. But it stopped mattering to me to know how exactly I’ll get there. I haven’t given up on goals or systems — my Google Calendar is packed, there’s a routine, there’s discipline. But now it’s not about “a precise sequence of steps,” it’s about moving toward an image. Every day I do the most I can in that direction, without tying myself to an exact route.

The main change is that I started relating to time differently. I stopped pushing myself. Did it happen today? Great. Tomorrow? Then let it be tomorrow. Wanted to go somewhere and it didn’t work out? Fine, I’ll go another time, when the circumstances line up and it’ll be a joy. More than that — I started rejecting outside pressure to speed any process along “at gunpoint.”

What appeared, in the end, was a kind of intuitive path. I didn’t do less — if anything, more. But my actions stopped being slaves to a rigid script. I began to notice chance meetings, new acquaintances, unexpected events — the kind of thing you could never have “planned.”

I realized: I used to try to bend the universe to my plan, and now, more and more, I trust it. It knows better how to bring me to that very image. And it’s exactly this trust that brings calm — a state of slow life, where you can savour the moment without the endless comparison to “how it could have been.” If the time passed wonderfully, that is the main result.

Here’s to planning — but not to the point of suffocation. Sometimes it’s the plans themselves that lead us off our true path! 😎