When Plans Fall Apart

Plans are wonderful things. Necessary things, even. They help us prepare for the future, anticipate what might be coming, make sure we have what we need, and take steps toward doing the things we want to do.

But, let’s be honest - things don’t always go according to plan.

In fact, they rarely do.

This doesn’t mean that planning is bad, unrealistic, unnecessary, or that we should stop making plans. But it does mean we need to learn the skill of pivoting when plans fall apart.

Making Plans

We can’t stop ourselves from anticipating our future. It’s what our brains are built to do. They’re the universe’s most complex anticipating machine. 

We anticipate at every moment what we’re about to perceive, what our next footstep will feel like, what our body will need in order to keep functioning well. All of this is happening automatically and mostly outside of our conscious awareness.

For more complex future events that we need to anticipate, we are much more consciously involved in the process. If we’re about to make plans with friends, or go on a trip, or move to a new neighborhood, or have a baby, there are a lot of logistics involved that require both mental anticipation and actions of preparation.

Anticipation is such a great thing, really, which is why our brains are doing it all the time. It’s just so much more efficient than waiting and reacting.

If your brain waited until you took a step before taking in all the relevant sensory information to balance your body, you would never be able to walk. Your brain instead constantly anticipates the movements necessary for each step and then makes corrections along the way.

Similarly, if you waited until you got to the airport before looking for what destination you’d like to travel to and what flights are available, you might be in for much longer waits, much fewer options, and much greater costs.

Thank goodness for plans.

When Things Fall Apart

Unfortunately (actually it’s a really good thing), the universe doesn’t treat our plans like direct orders.

Our brain anticipates a perception, but we are surprised by what we see. Our body anticipates a step, but the ground shifts underneath us.

We get on the road, but get a flat tire. We get to the airport, but our flight has been delayed. We get to the restaurant, but there’s a two-hour wait. We make travel plans, but our destination is about to be hit by a hurricane. We get a few years into a job we thought we’d like, but realize that the stressors outweigh the benefits.

When our brain unconsciously anticipates what’s coming, it also automatically makes adjustments when the incoming data is different than what was anticipated. Our brain then is able to use this little surprise to make better predictions in the future.

Conscious adjustments, however, take a bit more practice. It is much more difficult to adjust when our larger, more complex, more costly plans change.

This is in part because the change of a plan means we have experienced a loss, the loss of a future that will no longer be the case, at least not in the way that we had originally envisioned. And just like any loss, this kind of loss deserves to be grieved. It deserves feeling sadness, feeling anger, feeling disappointment, feeling any of the many feelings that may come with grieving.

Along with acknowledging the loss and allowing room for the feelings that come with it, we are also called by the situation to make some adjustments. While we need to acknowledge that reality is different from the plan we had made, we also need to at some point adjust our map to the new landscape rather than yell at the landscape for being different from our map.

A question that I find is often useful to help us step into the adjustment is this: What am I not noticing?

When we lose our plans, our first object of attention is the fact that we can’t do the thing we planned. The question of “what am I not noticing?” can help our attention turn to what we still can do in the situation.

We’re not noticing that we can explore the small town we’ve stopped in while our tire is getting repaired. We’re not noticing that we’re stuck for an extra day until the next flight tomorrow, meaning that we’ve got an extra day on vacation. We’re not noticing that there’s a beautiful spot by the river where we can hang out for two hours until a table opens up at the restaurant. We’re not noticing that there is a career direction we hadn’t considered before that might actually better suit our strengths and speak to our interests.

This practice is not about discounting, forgetting about, or minimizing the loss that comes from letting go of our first plans. In some cases, this loss can be devastating.

Instead, this practice, like many aspects of Existential Psychotherapy, is about finding the life-giving, vital, dynamic tension from acknowledging at the same time both the losses and the new opportunities that come with living in a changing world.

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