Plans, and the lack thereof

From Buddhist in Nebraska:

"I plan at lot. I mean, a lot, a lot. I plan my day, my week, my year, my life. I plan my route to run errands, which aisles in the grocery store to hit and in what order, how to arrange my closet, my bookshelves, my refrigerator, when to study for history and when for math, when to call this person and how to write that email, and what will be for dinner. Yet despite all of this, I am not an ultra-organized person. I space off and miss my turn. I end up going down the same aisle twice because I forgot something. My desk is piled with random papers and books. I rarely cook. You see, I am addicted to planning, but not to the plan."

I am addicted to neither the planning nor the plan. I also occasionally space off and miss my turn. The other day I spaced off and missed my own driveway. I was almost to the end of the block when I realized I had driven past my own house. Needless to say, I was not exactly in the moment when that happened.

Yesterday, I was driving a friend from lunch at 50th & Shartel to the PetSmart and 63rd and May. For those of you who don't live here, I will explain that that while these two locations are about two and half miles apart east to west, you can't drive directly between them because of a complicated expressway/boulevard junction that blocks the route.

So I was driving through a residential neighborhood, looking for a route that would get me across the expressway but finding none. Eventually I found myself driving through a familiar residential neighborhood, drifting south to 39th street, and realized I had taken this same path only a week earlier, with the same passenger, trying to get across the same expressway.

My friend commented that she always seemed to find herself on these wandering neighborhood drives whenever she went anywhere with me, and I remembered that my ex used to say the same thing.

I think the truth is the direct route always bores me. I get in the car and go, seldom having any notion of how I will get to the place I'm going. Sometimes I don't even know where I'm going, but I'm confident that I'll think of something eventually.

I often avoid expressways, which remind me of those long trails of ants you find carrying food back to the anthill from your kitchen countertop. I would rather drive through the neighborhoods, looking at the houses, glancing up at the trees overhead. There are few things more appealing to me than a neighborhood street canopied by tall sycamores or other trees.

Planning is another of those things that makes my brain sort of freeze up. I can be paralyzed by fear just starting a "To Do" list.

I feel that I've been fortunate or maybe blessed to have spent most of my life as a drifting, disorganized, mostly spontaneous cork bobbing on the sea of fate, and to have still ended up being in a mostly secure place in my middle age.

As I look back over my life, the best times were the ones spent more-or-less adrift. Those times when I was trying to be organized I was mostly working to make somebody else rich, and they weren't fun at all.