Out of Nowhere

We spend more time planning for things than actually doing them. Vacations . . . dinners . . . dates . . . weddings . . . kids . . . work . . . school . . . retirement . . . even our own funerals. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m as guilty as the next when it comes to planning, but if I look back on my life, some of the best moments were those unplanned. Coming out of nowhere, they took a hold of me and wiped away any notion of time. They were exhilarating. Magical. Made me feel truly alive.

Like that night in Quebec City when I asked a stranger to listen to some jazz and that stranger ended up being one of those rare connections you stumble across. It wasn’t lasting or love, but it was a reminder that random encounters of finding true love do exist outside of the movies and that the only to get to them is to throw out any sense of plot and just get lost in the constant reel of movie screen playing before us. The one that prefers improvisation over sticking to the script.

It was Allen Saunders, not John Lennon, who famously said “life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.” Life’s beauty is that in an instant anything can happen, anything can change. All our well-laid plans can disappear like a mouse into a hole in a wall. One second there, the next out of sight. Gone. It’s those messy parts, the ones that sweep us up and make us forget all about whatever future plans we may have made, that add much needed zing to this unwritten narrative that stretches ahead of us. What we often mistake for set in stone and given is in reality unwinding.