THE ART OF MAKING PLANS.

11 a.m. on a Tuesday in September. Cruising down Orchard Drive and I'm just about to exit my suburban Wilsonville neighborhood. Windows rolled down because it's another 80-something degree day and I have yet to get my air conditioning fixed. I'm hysterically laughing and I can't stop. I'm laughing so hard there are tears welling up in my eyes. 

The joke's on me. There is no art of making plans. There's no formula. No strategy. No technique.

Our human nature is cause for us to take comfort in making plans. Uncertainty seems to be the bane of our existence. So to satisfy our desire to sleep soundly, we paint our own glimpses into what the future might hold for us.

But of course, the future finds this comical and throws in a dash of disruption just to stir the pot. 

Falling victim to this chronic need of certainty and control that plagues humanity, I've had my own dose of the future's mockery. But after further contemplation, I started to redefine this mockery as a blessing, rather. There are so many flaws in human nature, so if we were truly calling the shots and making plans all of the time, who's to say what type of life we'd lead and what degree of happiness we'd truly achieve. You may or may not believe in a higher power. For me, keeping faith in an all-knowing God is what grounds me. But whatever or whomever you believe in, it's hard to accredit humanity's limited  perspective to the future's grand design.

The more we combat life's redirection and are too stubborn to let go of the reigns, the more it hurts when life does something drastic to put us on the new path that we need to be on. 

I'm almost downtown. Siri is shrilly directing me to the courthouse. I glance over at the yellow, shriveled piece of paper that is riding shotgun in my silver Honda Accord. It's worn and tattered from being nervously clenched a few weeks ago. This little piece of paper is going to make me shell out somewhere between 90 and 175 dollars from my already dwindling college-stricken bank account. But never mind that, it's only the cherry on top of the past few summer months.

Side note: never ride the TriMet before buying a ticket. No, you're no longer on the Eugene EmX where your University of Oregon Student ID card is valid public transportation fare. 

I've hit a few lows over the last three months. Life was handing me lemons faster than I could brew even the bitterest tasting lemonade. Amidst my own heartache, I was watching friends endure some pretty nasty things as well. Between losing loved ones, watching family suffer, and enduring heartbreak, it seemed life was luring a lot of people to their wit's end. Some of my own lows were small and petty but in addition to some of the larger ones that were simultaneously hurdling towards me, I was beginning to feel about two inches tall. 

There are three options. I can pay 90 dollars up front. I can await a court date two to three months from now. I can pick up cigarette butts for eight hours off the streets of downtown Portland. Welp, considering my job pays more than 90 dollars for 8 hours of work, and I will be living in Eugene two to three months from now, looks like I will be filling in my newly ordered sunflower checks with a payment of 90 dollars for a five dollar fare I neglected to purchase. 

I grab lunch with a friend while I'm downtown. We're recapping the day's events when it occurs to me. This is one more situation I've put behind me. 

My heart is still hurting and healing from other things that have happened this summer. But this is one less thing on my plate and that means I'm already some degree better than I was yesterday. I can't plan for future heartache, future annoyances, future roadblocks (though I can probably avoid another ticket by always purchasing a TriMet fare before riding) because those are inevitable. Our chronic need as humans to plan will always collide with life's grand plan of its own. All we can really do is arm ourselves with an army of friends and find entertainment in the uncertainty.

It was Tuesday at 11 a.m., driving down the all-too-familiar Orchard Drive. All of this went through my head. It's a few paragraphs worth of introspection but it hit me in about a nanosecond.

There's no art of making plans. There's just life. And the art of being present in it.