Unmaking Plans

I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be seen.- Looking for Alaska

As a freshman in high school, I told my college counselor that I wanted to go to seminary at Duke University. My plans, because I was so entangled in the web of Evangelicism and after-church dinners, was to join the ranks of the religious right and eventually become a youth pastor in a local church in Knoxville. But as I was sitting on my couch in Arlington last night as a graduate student in PR at Georgetown University, it hit me for the first time in my life that seminary at Duke was never going to happen. At some point in my life, those plans had changed, and no matter the age, I don't think that's something we're ever really prepared for... the changing of plans, that is.
But even though the Baptist church beat the desire to bring the message of Christ to pre-pubsecent children, the core of my plan remained the same: I loved the idea of communicating good news to people, and it's ultimately what prevailed when I chose public relations--but everything else, well... that didn't happen. It didn't change what I said to people up until my senior year of high school though. I continued to tell people that I would become a youth minister because that's what I had set out to do, and similarly, I told people in college that I would be a lawyer up until my senior year, when I affirmed for once that I was actually going into public relations instead. There's something commendable about sticking to your plan, even if your plan isn't what you originally intended. I have a habit of choosing a goal and refusing to back away from it, no matter how bad of an idea it ends up being.
But I recently had a friend tell me, If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans, which I'm sure comes from another source before that. And as I was sitting on my couch, considering how painfully obvious that it was that I had not gone to Duke for seminary, I found myself talking to Rebecca Neely on Facebook chat; for those of you unfamiliar with our background, Rebecca is a girl who took out a restraining order on me my sophomore year. The details are too long to explain in a paragraph, so I'll promise it as a blog, as I have before. But the important part of the story is that the restraining order did not go through, and Rebecca and I silently vowed never to talk to each other again. It was our plan, because that's what you do when you take out a restraining order/have a restraining order taken out against you. However, there she was asking me about how to overcome the fact that the guy she was talking to a guy liked Nickelback... and three years later, I was talking to her as if it had all never happened.
All of these seemingly unrelated anecdotes all dial back to one common denominator: at one point, I had a plan for my life, and even though I love my life and most of the details that help make it mine, very little of what I had planned out for myself ten years, or even five years, ago ever came close to being true. In having to realize that, I've also tried to become a little more relaxed in how life goes. I like to tell people I'm spontaneous, but at the end of the day, I'm not. It's similar to the way that I tell people that I really like hummus, then leave it in the fridge for three months or like when I tell people that I love to go out to the club, and then I stand near the bar taking visual inventory on who is going to eventually end their night with their head in the trash can. I'm a planner, and it's painful because life is not something that you plan. People and events and goals: they're not plan-able things, and when you attempt to put them in a box, I feel like the results are similar to putting my cat in a car carrier for an 9 hour car ride. You hear a lot of weird noises, and eventually, you just have to let the cat out.
And of that list of things, the most difficult part of life is making life work with other people. We are not a species that is easy to get along with, and we do not happen to come together that often. That's why I've always been so fascinated, and yes, jealous, of people my age who have managed to get married and possibly even reproduced by now. Somehow, in this crazy world, they've managed to come together, at least for the time being, and plan their lives together. They've agreed to this insane compromise of "we're going to make our lives work with each other." How could you ever know? We're constantly changing and becoming new people, and you're taking this giant risk investing in someone who could readily become a new person in the course of your lifetime or even a couple of years. But still, we choose to do it because the only thing we fear more than the chaos of life is having to face that chaos alone.
It wasn't until just this past year that I had to actually consider the idea of what it would mean to plan my life with someone, and when I was forced to choose between a relationship or the plans I had made for graduate school, I chose my plans. And I had to let it go, and when you really have to let something go, I think it kind of startles you.  You find yourself in a position when you've had to choose and you've had to change plans and you go down a road that you never thought you'd be going down, and after a while, you begin to change a little, too. And in such a big place with plans changing all of the time, I've considered what it would be like to take the power away from life--if you eliminate the variables out of life... the people, the places, the decisions that ultimately affect you the most, it could be easier. The details out of my control make me more frustrated than my own errors because I never had a chance to control them.
But it's selfish. Yes, people like me like to believe that life is something concrete and constructible. If I could know the exact date I would die, I would want to. But, that's a selfish thing to do because with all the time that you're spending on planning and hoping and getting things correct, you're taking away from the most valuable asset you have in the world. We define ourselves by what we've painted in our future and not how we've reacted to the moments of the past. And as I was riding the escalator up from the metro today, I was considering this topic and this blog, and I thought about two people. I bitch and complain about the people I've invested in who have disappointed me, and the plans of my past that have gone awry, and the simple everyday losses that I face... when in reality, I haven't had too much to complain about.
The first person I thought about was the man I pulled out of a river a couple years ago. By the time we pulled him out, he had drowned; in the course of five minutes, he had changed at least two people's plans: his and mine. Because of how unpredictable the world is, his life was over. As for me, I was presented with the chance to save a life, and ultimately I couldn't. No change-of-plan has ever hurt more. And when you see something like that: the life literally drained from someone's face--someone your age lying in front of you, not breathing... well, it kind of makes you wonder what's the point? These people and places are all fleeting. You can't depend on anyone, and even when you can, everyone eventually dies. Obviously, I was not too happy halfway up the escalator.
But I had enough time to think of someone else because escalators in DC are long. The second person I thought of was my mom. Over the course of two years, she became pregnant twice. She carried both babies, little girls, to seven and eight months, respectively, before she miscarried. And when I talked to her about it, she told me that she never asked God why it happened because that's not fair.  She told me to never question God because I didn't have the authority to do so. And then there's me: going around barely invoking the presence of God because I still feel like I have some kind of say-so in how my life goes, when in reality, the role I play in how the world works is minute. I can't control the people around me, how they treat me, and the extraneous circumstances that may change my route in life.
But as the escalator neared the top, I realized that I had something that a lot of people don't. Yes, my plan has changed quite a lot and in turn, I've changed a lot as a person. But I was moving toward this light, as overcast and dim as it may be, and at the crest of that escalator, I could continue to live. I would live amongst the mess and the assholes and the roadblocks, but the operative word is: live. And as I neared the top and quickly reflected on all that I had contemplated on a morning metro ride, it seemed apparent to me that maybe I didn't need to go to seminary after all.
People go and change and grow away from one another. Circumstances cause us to have to head in a different direction than we ever anticipated, but I like to believe that maybe the plans we are forced to take are better than the ones we had in mind for ourselves to begin with.