What about when it all goes wrong?

You are born. Between 7 and 9 months of age you begin to crawl. Between 10 and 12 months of age you begin to say some words and you begin to stand. Between 12 and 18 months you are walking.....Now you are five and you start Kindergarten. You progress your way through elementary school. You enter middle school. Now you are in high school. Once you are graduated you attend college (most of the time)

Now what???

It would seem that somewhere in the late middle school and early high school range that you have started dating. Maybe you have had some short term relationships. Maybe in high school you had a long term one that ventures into college. For most graduating college also yields becoming engaged. So obviously you get married next. You buy a house. You get a dog. You buy a new car. You have kids. You watch your kids grow. They go to elementary school, middle school and high school. They graduate college and get married. You are retired now. You travel. You own a home at the beach and vacation there during the winter months. You pass on and the cycle continues for your kids and grandkids.

Now to me it seems like I just described a very "traditional" American life, so what happens when something goes wrong? When your "traditional" plan goes off the path? Life becomes harder and in my experience much more difficult. Your whole life a plan of some sort has been laid out for you. The next step has always been prevalent and obvious. So it would seem that at my stage in my life, engagement should be approaching, but what does one do when they know that is NOT the next step in their life?

What happens when everything gets out of sync? When you get out of order? When you pass go and do not collect two hundred dollars?

Things get complicated, messy, sticky and misunderstood when they don't happened the way you planned, or thought. Plans have always been in my life. I am a planner. I like to know, somewhat, what I will be doing each day. I like to have a small grasp on where I will be in one year from now, five years from now and sometimes even fifty years from now. I plan what I am going to wear when I pack. I simply don't throw clothes in a bag. I plan what I want to do each day on a trip. I plan how much money I would like to have saved one year from now and even fifty years from now. I plan a type of home I would like to be living in. I plan the types of animals I will own. I think you get the point....I try to plan the best that I can.

However, lately I have been feeling like I have been "planning ahead" and I end up "jinxing" myself.

	jinx
	A superstitious term meaning to give something bad luck or misfourtune

I feel like I have been planning ahead for my life and all of a sudden the thing I was planning has been yanked from my sites. This is definitely throwing me off. I don't know what to do, but who does when what they planned goes all wrong?

Anyways, not sure there was a point to this blog, per usual, except for my rambling while trying to make sense of things happening in my life.

“We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.”

- Ben Okri