Tag: plans
Press the button and change your plans
Press the button and change your plans
So many wonderful people have sent me messages recently, this one particularly got me thinking:
“One sermon I heard at church…you are really excited about your vacation to Italy, you plan, map out and are all set for a fantastic vacation. You board the plane with your plans, maps, highlighted spots to visit, etc. and you land in Holland. What happens then?…do you embrace the beauty of Holland and all that Holland has to offer or do you just focus on Italy and what your plans were?”
Claire and I really did have plans, we were going to each work two or three days a week and spend the rest of the time bimbling around in our camper van. When our youngest child was 18 Clare was also going to have a sabbatical, anyone that knew her knows that she could tell you exactly the number of years, months and days until that was. Claire TOLD me, yes TOLD me that she was going to have an entire year where she did no cooking, no cleaning and no looking after anyone else and that we would have to spend that year running around after her. Fair enough I suppose after all she had given up for her family.
From my perspective I have been ensuring that my business is mobile and can be run from anywhere in the country leaving us free to travel and me able to do a few hours of work each day from where ever we parked the campervan.
That plan went out of the window on 17th April this year.
There must be something in our human nature which upsets us if our carefully laid plans don’t work out. What happens if we board the plane to Italy and land in Holland?
I saw this video recently from Heineken, listen to the reasons people give for not being able to change their plans.
“There’s no way we can change these plans, this is a bachelor party”
“I’d have to go through security and get on a plane and then go back to my real life”
“I can’t cancel this trip because it’s for work”
I find it striking watching that video and seeing the similarities in my life at the moment. The anxiety about pressing the button, ‘I can’t do it, I’ve got plans‘ is exactly how I feel… ‘Claire can’t die now, we’ve got plans’
But the button has been pressed, someone pressed it for me and took the decision out of my hands, I’m in a destination that I’ve never even heard of let alone considered visiting, and so I guess it’s down to me to make the most of it, right?
The Paradox of Despair
The Paradox of Despair
I’m currently reading an excellent book called “Seven Choices – finding daylight after loss shatters your world” by Dr Elizabeth Harper Neeld. It’s the account of Dr Neeld as she works through the emotions she feels after the loss of her husband to a very sudden death. Her story resonates deeply with my own situation.
Some of the things she writes are especially challenging and I’d like to share one of those challenging thoughts here.
Something which she has picked up on, which I strongly recognise, is the double loss of losing someone so close, not only have we lost the person as an individual but we have also lost our “Assumed Future”. We all have an assumption about how our future will pan out, even if it is not explicitly written in a life goal (as mine was) we will have a general feeling or an idea about where life is taking us.
Visits to the park, Christmas’ shared, birthdays celebrated together and even things further off – we imagine growing old, how life will be once our own children have grown up and the time we can share with each other in the future.
I’m not just talking about myself here, I’m talking about Claire’s sister, brother, mum, dad and my own kids. We all had an assumption about how life could possibly be in the future and we now have to face the loss of that as well as the loss of Claire herself. In fact anyone that knew Claire would also have had these assumptions about the future and how they would share their lives together in years to come.
This deep loss leads us to a place of despair. Despair is a word, indeed an emotion which I have never considered before. Of course I knew what the word meant academically, but now I know what it means to experience it myself.
As Dr Neeld points out, and this takes some deep thought, the fact that we are experiencing this despair means that our assumptions have been destroyed, and when assumptions are destroyed it opens up enormous possibilities. Wow, what a paradox!
When I did my creativity module of my MBA we spent many months looking at how assumptions by people in business stifle creativity and how breaking down those assumptions about their ‘given future’ in their career would massively help the business and greatly improve creativity. Without assumptions all we are left with is possibilities.
And there is the irony!
The truth is that if we feel that despair then we also have a world of possibilities. The challenge now is to allow those possibilities to happen at the same time as giving despair the respect it deserves.
Claire. My head knows that this is the truth and this is the kind of discussion I truly miss. Ironically, we could have spent a couple of hours discussing this and I know in my heart that you would have come to the same conclusion. You would have recognised the paradox of despair and possibility, indeed with your counselling training you may already have done so. I’m not going to lie, my heart feels differently. All I can feel at the moment is despair, I know the possibilites are out there and I guess that the first stage is recognising that – accepting and looking for those possibilities is something I can work towards. Goodnight sweetheart, I love you.