Sometimes the way you want life to happen isn’t the way it shows up. Ever make elaborate, detailed plans and then it just all blows up? There is a reason the Yiddish phrase “Man plans, God laughs” is so often referenced. As humans, we love to have a plan. We love a predictable path with limited change. We evolved that way because it avoided the unpredictable or the unfamiliar. That kept us safe. Well-rehearsed patterns allowed us to be experts in our predictable patterns.
However, you may have noticed that life is changing faster than ever, and our best-thought-out plans and wishes seem to evaporate in a puff of steam, faster than snacks at a teen soccer tournament. I’m often asked if it is even worth it to make plans or have dreams, and I respond with an emphatic YES… and.
The “and” part is that you have to be adaptable with how that dream arrives.
Deadlocked on How
Part of our tendency to plan is that we can get very rigid ideas about how it needs to arrive. We get locked into ideas about the way we want life to look and how we want our solutions and dreams to arrive. I’ve seen employers post a job opening and then feel frustrated that the candidates aren’t similar to the last person they hired and promoted. The new set of candidates doesn’t seem to fit into the box of what was predetermined to be a good fit. A new generation of applicants that sound, look, and behave differently has applied. The employer seemed blocked in looking at the candidates and making the match based on what is needed and available today, instead of the imagined person that would fit into the preset idea.
We do this in our personal lives, too. We imagine or plan for one idea, and then when the reality proves to be different, we lose our equilibrium. We may find ourselves disillusioned because marriage isn’t the magical fairytale that we dreamed when we walked down the aisle. Turns out that it is a constant need to work at communication and a willingness to stay in the struggle to find a win-win. I can attest that I was a phenomenal, Mary Poppins of a mother, until I actually had a child. The Pinterest vision of motherhood is a lie that neither my child nor I could squeeze into. The career in finance that I had long planned and worked for out of college caused me to come home every night and cry.
The bottom line is that life doesn’t show up the way that we want, or even the way that we have carefully planned. Which may actually be the best news because we may get something even better if we use the original plan as a starting point for a new direction.
Reality-Based Assessment
My savvy real estate agent, Sherine Beltran, quipped, “If you’re in the desert, it doesn’t matter how much you want sushi; you need to order something else.” She is one of those people who seems to find an opening in solid rock. She has this knack for finding answers in impossible situations, and her off-the-cuff remark about knowing what to order and when means a lot more than a decent dinner. She’s talking about accepting the reality of the circumstances and looking for what may be possible based on what is available. You’re not going to get good, fresh, amazing sushi delivered in the landlocked desert, but if you look at the reality of the situation, you may find yourself drinking prickly pear lemonade and noshing on decadent stuffed dates. The same truth holds for the rest of our lives, and it would be a shame not to take something wonderful because we were restricting ourselves to one plan that didn’t end up fitting the reality of the situation.
Release the “Should”
The first step is to release the idea that what is available should be different. If you find yourself complaining that any situation or person “shouldn’t” be that way, then you are blocked. You cannot find solutions in the “land of should.” You’ll need to transport yourself back to reality. While there can be a lot of fear that accepting reality and how things are currently is a form of giving up and allowing the malaise of life to descend into unadjudicated complacency, it actually accomplishes the opposite. Acceptance of what is presently is the path to change. I call it reality-based decision making. You’re not making decisions based on wishful thinking. You accept what is present, and that is where the magic begins, because you begin to see what else is possible.
Ask a New Question
My daughter loves to use AI to take a picture of what is in the refrigerator, and have it tell us what we could make for dinner. It comes up with some audacious dish ideas most of the time, but every once in a while we get a hit that results in a delicious meal. Instead of staring into the fridge and wishing I’d picked up a few other items at the store, we’re asking the question of what could be with what is here. We have to embrace the irony that wishing for what was leaves us stuck, while accepting what is allows us to see brilliant new ideas and solutions. Rethinking how to use what is available is where our answer resides and where we can even find new material with which to work. The question becomes, “What is the optimal solution here?” Through acceptance of what is available now, fresh creative solutions arise. The resistance of what should be dissolves into what can be. What can be isn’t a sellout; it is a transformative way to arrange the pieces.
Staying relevant and finding solutions means letting go of the way you wished it could be and allowing yourself to see and take the best of what is available. This isn’t giving up. This is moving up! When you filter for the answer, not only will you find a path forward, but you’ll get something far better.
