Making Plans, Changing Plans

Making Plans, Changing Plans

If you don't know where you're going, you'll wind up someplace else. -Yogi Berra

I can make, break, and remake plans in a thoughtful manner

Living with addiction and dysfunction left me with an anxious relationship with plans. Our family polarized along two extremes: some of us could not make plans and had to "hang loose" to such an extent that no one could stick to much of a schedule; and some of us could not change plans, we made them and clung to them. Each of these is a result of feeling disturbed by plans that were constantly falling apart, and by extension, by lives that were falling apart. What we had thought we could count on was no longer holding. Plans were constantly collapsing in midair. As a defense against feeling the anxiety that not being able to count on a plan engendered, or the chaos and disappointment of plans exploding or disappearing into nowhere, some of us pretended plans didn't matter-we adopted laissez-faire attitudes designed to disguise pain. Others held onto plans so tightly in an effort to get something to happen in a normal way that we couldn't roll with changes. Today, I am somewhere in the middle, I can make a plan and I can thoughtfully change a plan.