Our Crooked Path

Life does not and never will move along a straight line. Our life will always be one of winding paths that diverge unexpectedly.

What I read: “Life Does Not Always Move In Straight Lines” by Anne Thériault. Published February 8, 2016.

This morning I sat down to do my daily high-level planning exercise that I do nearly every morning. One moment I was plotting out my day after referencing my calendar and the ongoing list of menu items I keep of tasks and projects. Then, I got an email. Suddenly, plans changed.

It was a good change. I was able to say yes to something I hadn’t expected to be doing but that would bring me joy. So, I jumped at the chance. My plans for the day got reshuffled and reprioritized in an instant.

That’s how life goes. We are occasionally under the mistaken assumption we can shoehorn our expectations and plans into the unpredictable container of life. We can’t. We can create plans, but we have to be ready to change them. That applies to long-term and short-term plans.

Getting comfortable with this truth about the unpredictability of life has taken some time. I grew up in an era that mistakenly told everyone if you planned correctly, worked hard, and stayed on the path, you’d always hit your targets, whatever those targets might be. No. Just no.

The really horrific thing about the contradiction between what productivity and efficiency “experts” tell us and the truth is that we tend to believe the experts even when the stark reality of life is staring us directly in the face. Look all around. Life is unpredictable. All of it. Why would you think your life is any different?

But we’re human. We often believe others who are acclaimed in the media or have lots of letters after their name or have otherwise been elevated to expert status. It’s difficult to stand strong amid reality when so many are offering us such an appealing fantasy.

Anne Thériault writes about this conundrum from the standpoint of a writer facing the realization that their writing isn’t going as planned. Deviations from the plan, process, or goal is somehow construed as failure. Thériault points out that our culture tends to see success and failure as a binary,

Failure and success are a funny binary. A marriage can be a strong healthy relationship for a dozen years or more, but if for whatever reason it ends in divorce then we still call it a failed marriage. The same goes for failed careers, as if the choice to move on to something else eclipses any good times that might have happened. The way we apply these labels after the fact makes it seem like the whole enterprise was always objectively a big mistake. This, in turn, rewrites the narrative of our experiences so that they comfortably fit the model of failure/success – because if they didn’t, what would they be? Just a mess of good and bad that doesn’t make any rational sense.

Success and failure is a spectrum, not a binary. And you can shift to an entirely different spectrum if you so choose.

If for some reason your plans changed today, it’s fine. So did most other people’s plans. If you started on one path but life decided to put you on another, it’s fine. Happens to everyone.

There is only one imperative. Keep going. Keep trying. Keep adjusting. Keep reprioritizing. I’d love to offer you a simple hack to somehow help you achieve everything you’ve ever dreamed of attaining without a whole bunch of hiccups, false starts, twists and turns, or failed directions. But I can’t. All I can say is I hope you take some comfort in knowing that the frustrations you feel when life doesn’t go the way you plan are felt by everyone else too.

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