To plan or not to plan…

“For man proposes, but God disposes; neither is the way of man in his own hands”

Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

As thinking creatures who obsessively worry about the future, we plan our lives to the best of our abilities. We use planners, charts, and even horoscopes for this end. A meticulously drawn-out future, we expect, is the recipe for success, wealth, and happiness.

But life has a notorious tendency to disrupt all our plans. The millions of things that can go wrong hide with a giggle in the state of probabilities while you plan and jump into existence at the worst possible moment.

 It is quite frustrating when unexpected storms wreck and throw us out of our course. I can’t place my finger on what hurts more: the havoc caused by the disruption or the loss of our imagined smooth sailing.

Murphy’s law

You might be familiar with Murphy’s law. Apparently, the scientist came up with it out of desperation. It is now used in almost all fields as a vent to the frustration towards the antagonistic attitude of life towards all human beings.

‘Anything that can go wrong will go wrong and at the worst possible time.’ 

In my opinion, this is the single most universal, factual, and observable scientific theory of all time.

No one can confidently say that they have dodged the back-handed slap of this universal law. The reason Murphy’s laws make you laugh your head off is that you can relate to them completely. You would have experienced it at least once in your life.

Murphy and me

All through my life, I have faced the vicious attack of Murphy’s law. My friends and family are so used to this that they greet me with the question, ‘What has gone wrong today?’ They even take measures to keep me away from important events like I am some kind of a poltergeist.

I can reiterate many life events—trains canceled, roads blocked, websites down, and the personal favorite: my car going on a strike on the day of my marriage—to demonstrate this. However, for the sake of brevity, let me just say that my biography is filled in every line with at least one unexpected/ unfortunate/ outright comical event.

But now I have become used to it. I now know that whatever I plan will not work out and hence I have a backup plan. Mostly, these backup plans also won’t work out and hence I have a backup for every backup plan.

Sometimes I even stick my tongue out at fate by not having a plan at all. 

The silver lining

Though my life is notoriously unplannable, there is a silver lining. However difficult it gets to do simple things, strayed events are from the plan, and complicated and utterly unintelligible problems turn out, everything ends well.

In the long run, nothing has gone terribly wrong. In fact, it has turned out to be better than my plan. My job, my wife, my home, and many such things are testimonials of the benign kindness life showed me by disrupting my ingenious (or so I believed) ploy.

Hence I am now more of a realist who trusts in the ultimate good. When my plans do not work out, though frustrated, I go with the beat. 

Keep planning. But trust that life has better ideas for you, and keep calm in the face of storms. There is nothing much you can do anyway.

Thank you for reading. Please let me know your thoughts in the comment box.