A mantra is a sound, syllable, word, or group of words that is considered capable of "creating transformation".
Every Monday I will post a new thought, idea, or focus for the week. When you need a breather from life, when you need a little inspiration, or when you're about to jump over the conference table and strangle your co-worker, remember the mantra.
My friend, Ben, had a very specific future mapped out. The details were so breathtaking and so specific that when he asked me what I thought my future would look like, I was embarrassed. At that point in my life, the future seemed so terrifying and so uncertain that I didn't actually know what I would do or who I would be or how anything would turn out. Anytime someone would ask me a question about the future, I would default to the Every Person Five Year Plan: Go to college, get a job, get married- the norm. The safe answer. The answer people expected.
Ben's answer was the compete opposite. Unexpected and beautiful. Thoughtful and hopeful. My "plan" was nothing in comparison to his mountain and his house, his rocking chairs and his one-day grandchildren. I remember how exact this future, his future, was. How peaceful and serene. How, as soon as he started describing it, I could see it all as clearly as if I were watching a movie. I could see the sun setting, the children playing with kites out in a large field of wild grass. I saw the pale blue gray porch, the white wooden rocking chairs. I swear I could even feel the breeze on my skin.
Even now, I can recall in exact detail the picture he painted for me all those years ago. So crystal clear that I have to remind myself it's not a memory of something I actually experienced, it's merely a memory of a thought of someone's beautiful future plans.
That picture has never changed for me. It never changed for him either because his life ended not long after that night. His beautiful plans didn't stand a chance against what life brought him instead.
My life kept going. My unplanned, terrified of growing up, boring life. And, as life will do, it surprised me. Some of it was as expected: I did go to college, I did get a job, I did eventually get married. But many, many other things happened that I never would have dreamed, that would never have even occurred to me to consider.
I did not expect to live a life full of adventure. Not once did I think I'd travel all around the world time and time again, so smitten with this planet that I literally can't get enough of it. That no amount of destinations ever seems enough. That the more places I go, the more I cross off my list, somehow, someway, the list gets longer and longer.
My life is ordinary in many, many ways. In ways I probably could have assumed, so long ago. But I think the beauty in the unexpected ways is just that: I didn't expect a single one of them. No amount of planning I could have done as a teenager would have brought me here right now. And trust me, eventually I became a planning machine. But what I'm learning is that life has a way of going on without the plans you've made, taking you where it will, how it will, without your say.
So maybe the lesson here is having a plan without plans. Maybe the lesson is to simply live and, eventually, live your way into a life you most likely never would have imagined in the first place. Maybe it will resemble something you had imagined or maybe it won't. Maybe it will be better, maybe it will be worse. Maybe it will be both at times, as life tends to be. And maybe, just maybe, that's the way things are meant to be; uncertain, undefined, mysterious. Rebellious against all of our silly human ways of trying to control things we know nothing about, like the future.
I'm trying to tame my planning ways to allow more space for life to unfold as it should, without my interfering. Without my attempts to control it all the time. I'm trying to live life with a little bit more uncertainty, a little bit more openness to what may come.
I'm trying to embrace the greatest plan of all: the one that doesn't exist.
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