Tag Archives: best laid plans

Worlds Apart

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photoOn Not being Quite Specific Enough

An Athabascan lady and a young Mauritian man

Met on the bus while shuttling to the airport in Japan

And planned a summer get-together in the town of Dent,

But didn’t think of all details—yet still, one day they went

To meet each other in that little place—the town so small

They didn’t guess there would be need for detailed plans at all—

Sadly, the lady was in Minnesota, with no clue

Her friend was off in Cumbria, the Dent of English hue,

Completely unaware as well that continents away

His lady-friend awaited him, unknowing, that same day—

And so they never met again, each sad the other failed

To know how much they’d hoped to meet, and what it had entailed

To reach their distant rendezvous and keep their destined date,

And neither learned there were two towns named Dent until too late.photo

A Date with Heraclitus

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12

We all have a certain number of fixed elements in the schedules of our lives. At least, we think we do. And most of the time, we manage to keep them in fair order and stick to them. That, in itself, is really rather near to miraculous.

Every one of you who has crashed breathlessly through the door at four seconds to ten for the 18th weekly meeting of your Steering Committee, after an epic morning battling with a cracked molar, a stuck zipper, a closed freeway exit and a sinkhole that opened directly under your reserved parking space–only to find last night’s emergency notice scrawled on the white board, informing everyone that the meeting had to be moved to the Annex back on the other side of town–you know what I’m talking about.

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Well, I know why *that* Mourning Dove was crying . . .

Best laid plans, Ha! Old Reliable, Ho-ho-ho! Change happens, endlessly. Who am I to argue against the great philosopher who says so?

No matter how wizardly we are in arranging our lives, planning and organizing and arranging to the finest and most delicate degree of control, all of the skill and dedication in the world can’t stop the flow of life’s river from going where, when and how it will.

The good news is that despite the vicissitudes of our ever-changing reality. We manage, and we do so well enough most of the time that we can maintain the illusion, perhaps even the delusion, that we can predict and control our lives’ events for the most part. The very fact that things ‘gang aft agley‘ as they do keeps us on the alert and trains us to be flexible when we must, inventive when we can, and swift to recover when all else fails. Change, as we all must finally allow, is the only true constant.

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Some days even the repair equipment is just not up to the task . . .

Now, should I post this today, I wonder? Or should I write another post and save this one for another day, when something comes up unexpectedly–and it will–and disrupts my plan for that day’s post? Always good to have a get-out-of-jail-free pass tucked in my back pocket, I should think . . .