Embracing the Unexpected

While on the phone with my mom the other day, she mentioned in passing for me to "embrace Plan B." I laughed, and said "thats the story of my life."  But after the laughing, I realized, it really is.

Something I do often is plan things out.  I look at menus before I go to restaurants, I calculate how much things will cost before I shop, I like knowing my weekend plans by Wednesday at the latest.  I've been obsessive like this as long as I can remember, and it's usually pretty helpful.

Until something doesn't go according to plan.

For whatever reason, this is becoming the norm.  Nothing goes according to my plans anymore.  No matter how hard I try to schedule and arrange and research, the Universe has its own ideas, and they rarely match up with mine.  So, slowly but surely, I've been learning to embrace these unexpected changes in plan.

It's very easy for one thing to go wrong and for the rest of my day to very quickly spiral out of my control.  However, the faster I can leet go of my own plans and ideas, the easier things get for me.  At this point, when something falls through for me, its almost second nature for me to recover quickly, and relatively unscathed.

Its like when you're walking down the street and you stumble: you can either freak out more and end up flat on your face, or you can recover gracefully and keep on walking like nothing even happened.