The plan is that there is no plan
Sunday, February 19, 2012 at 08:32PM When it comes to the big picture, I’m a pretty go with the flow, see what comes out of left field kind of person. Move to the country? Sure, let’s give it a burl. Take a job as an event manager even though I have no qualifications or experience? Yeah, why not? I’m a big fan of left field – it has been good to me.
Give me the minutiae of everyday life, however, and I plan my days in 30-minute segments. I’m the list queen. My weekends start with a timed list on the back of an envelope – two 30 minute walks with the dog are scheduled, one each end of the day, as is ‘reading the paper in bed’, shopping, cooking, cleaning the house, writing the weekly blog post, even napping. An unanticipated drop in by a friend or neighbour can throw my whole day into chaos. In the Myers-Briggs personality inventory, I am pure ‘J’ – organised, anally-retentive, needing to know well in advance what is going to happen.
My husband is a more spontaneous ‘P’ type. If we have a day off together, he may say, ‘let’s go to a movie’, at which I take a deep breath, bite my tongue, mentally rearrange my to do list and say, ‘great idea’. Sometimes, on a holiday morning when we are having our second cup of tea over books and papers in bed, I say to him, ‘What’s the plan?’ and he responds, ‘The plan is that there is no plan’, causing me equal measures of panic and excitement.
So, just this last weekend, after I’d had surgery on my knee and was told I had to keep my feet up for three days, I decided to conduct a bold experiment. No plans and no lists for 72 hours.
It has been exhilarating, terrifying and strange. Friday, still a bit spaced out from morphine and my first general anaesthetic since I was a kid, I slept for a good deal of the day. Saturday and Sunday, I read the weekend papers in bed for hours. Literally. But I didn’t write ‘10-12.30 read weekend paper’ as I might have done in the past. No, the new me read the paper till she felt like stopping. Sometimes she just stretched out in bed and stared at the ceiling. She knitted with her daughter. She didn’t go to church. She rang friends, just to chat, and didn’t panic when a couple of mates dropped in unannounced.
Yes, I know, it does sound a bit tragic. It’s not all bad, however. It’s how I’ve managed to keep writing through years of childrearing and paid work. Up until now, in most ways, my J-ness has served me well.
But now that I am no longer in charge of running a big family, it might pay me to loosen up a little. Having long established the habit of writing thousands of words every week, being a little less organised might help develop my creativity in unexpected directions. It might make me a more relaxed friend, mum and partner. Three days of enforced and utter idleness might be just the shock therapy required to kick start a new, laid-back, slightly more spontaneous me.
Reader Comments (2)
Hope for your continued recovery from knee operation, Clare.
And it's very therapeutic just to 'watch the grass grow'. As a busy mum of four, I'm probably more like your husband though. I like it when
there is no plan
btw, if you're looking for a movie to see I'd recommend "The Descendants", the blurb on the poster at the theatre said "flat out - the best movie this year" and I'd have to agree - so far!
" What a wonderful feeling it is to do nothing and then to rest afterwards."
I love this quote that I found on a greeting card a few years ago and I thought it might inspire you as you try to modify your J behavior which I know only too well! Hope the knee is getting better.