Everyday, I’m told what will happen to me.
The county tells me what my home is worth and sends me a bill. A company I have no control or equity in tells me my work is no longer needed, and I’m going to burn through savings for a while. My body is the most complex symphony of systems I’m blissfully unaware of, all of which could go catastrophically wrong.
I don’t like this. I’d like a little more say in the matter.
So, I make plans.
I try to eat better. I buy insurance for the house. I try to learn things to stay employable and polish my resume. I post on LinkedIn (gross). I network. I (try to) save money.
This is where actions feel like futile attempts to negotiate with the universe.
If I save enough, research enough, stay informed enough, post enough, perhaps I can prevent these bad things from happening to me. I can prevent a future where I live under a bridge, or die of a rare disease, or simply forgotten by my peers.
While none of those things have happened to me yet, life overall has shown little interest in this arrangement.
We can influence all kinds of things, but promise none of them.
You can write down a meticulous five year plan, then meet someone next Tuesday that makes the entire thing irrelevant. Telling the universe what to do is like an ant telling me not to mow the mound in my back yard.
Dad’s gonna mow, ant.
Wrong Turns
The longer I orbit the sun, the more I realize the best things in my life arrived in the packaging of an inconvenience. A wrong turn, a mistake, a missed appointment or simply “bad luck.”
When I was 17, I couldn’t stay away from anything fast on four wheels.
It was the early 2000s, a car renessiance capitalized by the first The Fast and the Furious film (Nopi Nationals 2003 was car history I was fortunate enough to live through).
Then, my Mom brought home a car for herself. It was manual, and Japanese. Then she pulled it into the driveway.
A Miata.
A Miata?
The air let out from my lungs.
a miata.
“Hairdresser’s car. Our lawnmower has more power.” I said, at least to myself under my breath.
The next 18 months changed my life-long passion for cars forever. I fell deeply in love with the Miata. At 40, driving a Miata still makes me feel 17. A kid with unkempt wavy brown hair, with the world still in front of him.
If I had my way, I would’ve bought a mark-ii Supra. Far too fast to enjoy legally. Far too expensive to put miles on.
Twenty-three years later I’m still driving Miatas and enjoying the community that came along with it.
Our Jobs
There are other examples.
Jobs I didn’t get. People I met because some other plan fell apart. It’s difficult to see any of this while it’s happening.
Bad luck still feels like bad luck. Getting laid off doesn’t suddenly become charming because maybe, someday, there’s a lesson hiding inside it. A diagnosis is not a gift. Losing someone is not the universe clearing space for something better.
Sometimes terrible things are simply terrible.
But, I’m becoming less interested in demanding that I know what an event means while I’m standing inside of it. The tension in modern living comes from trying to do the universes’ job. Prevent the job loss, engineer the future, none of that is in the job description meant for us.
Our job is to decide who handles those events when the come. When the door bell rings, who answers?
Are we kind? Do we keep our word? Do we work hard? Pick up the phone and call a friend (yes, like an actual phone call)?
It seems we optimize for an outcome that is simply illusion, when looking inward gives us the most control of our experience.
I’m going to keep trying to save money, eat better, buy insurance and stay informed. But I’ll do so without the pretense of engineering a future I do not control.
Instead, I will engineer who shows up.
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