You Don’t Always Need a Plan

“You don’t always need a plan. Sometimes you just need to breathe, trust. let go and see what happens.” Mandy Hale

By nature, I am a planner.  This is a trait that has done me well in my life.  Because of it, I moved up in my career extremely quickly which made leaving it that much harder.

When Lauren and I began the process of thinking individually about what we wanted to express verbally on this blog, I had a flood of ideas that came to me.  I wrote pages containing lists of ideas to start working on.  I have a very hard time putting boundaries on myself in terms of dividing my time between self care and helping others.  As I am sure many of you can relate, the self care generally comes in second place.  I began to devise an experiment for myself that involved putting hard boundaries on my personal time.  I began to carve out a list of my Requirements for Sanity  of what I need for my own functioning.  Without this time for myself, I usually end up putting others’ requests above my own until I am a sloppy mess.  I would say no always to requests that infringed on that Me Time.  That should do it.

After making lists of what those hard boundaries would be (do we see a trend with me and lists?), I began to realize something about the errors of my experiment.  Usually, living with a chronic illness requires an abundance of planning.  Planning travel, children, finances and really everything under the sun.  Maybe I am taking away from living a care-free life with all of my hyper-vigilant planning?  Why not allow my everyday life to be unplanned?  Maybe to soften up my life is a new part of my list for health.  For me, I think by planning my life to the maximum, exercise, canning, gardening, meditation, social engagements, I am planning my life so full that there is no time to feel the sadness and loss that comes with illness.  Sometimes I feel we need to just sit in the stillness, even if it is uncomfortable, and feel it.

Possibly by feeling that, I will find the freedom within.  Hopefully we can all find that space.