Change, Choice, and Serendipity
Lately, I’m drowning in choices, so it was perfect timing that I saw The Adjustment Bureau yesterday. Totally rocked. It’s loosely inspired by Philip K. Dick’s short story, “Adjustment Team.”
The movie explores the conflict between a person’s free will to choose and the “Chairman’s” (or God’s, or the Universe’s) plan. The Adjustment Bureau’s agents run around and cause tiny little changes—small moments of serendipity (or bad luck) that create a life-altering change in a person’s life. Here’s the trailer, if you haven’t seen it:
While I’ve been swimming through a sea of choices in my life, I realized that I have great faith in serendipity, but I’m not sure that’s a good thing. Worse, I have little faith in planning—
God likes to laugh.
The biggest choices in my life weren’t choices. I planned on being a vocal accompanist, but I got sick for ten years. I decided I was grateful, because I ended up teaching, and I truly believe I was meant to do that, and I wouldn’t take that back for the world. I loved every minute of it, minus a few parents.
While I was happily teaching, writing started taking over my life. It was never a decision—more like the universe eventually persuaded me to focus on writing.
The whole ebook formatting career was another happy accident. (One I’m grateful for every day. It sorta feels like all of you led me there, by asking me to do this little techie thing or another. Thanks!)
So you can see why I distrust plans. And choices? After the universe made me sick for ten years, I have this fear that if I make the wrong choice, the universe will rain down hell to get me back on the path it prefers. Or I fear wasting a bunch of time planning, only to have God laugh and send me off in a totally different direction.
Life is unpredictable.
On the other hand, I made a plan to move into a camper. I spent years de-cluttering, planning, and whittling down possessions. I researched for years, and then I made it happen. No serendipity there, and God (knock on wood) didn’t laugh. (Phew!)
As I was walking and and looking at the moon and stars tonight, I realized that I was a bit afraid of making plans, given my life’s history. But there are things I want, and I want to make them happen, too.
It comes down to free will, choice, and planning versus serendipity, chance, and God’s/the Universe’s/the Whatever’s plan.
Being a Libra, I generally come down smack in the middle, but I think for the next year, I’m going with free will, choice, and planning.
What about you? How have your big plans worked out in life? Has the Universe ever altered those plans in a big way? And what about serendipity? Or bad luck? Do you ever just want to throw up your hands and stop planning, because the Universe seems to have its own plan for you? Or do your plans mostly work out?
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Natasha Fondren is an eBook developer, writer, and classical pianist. After a fifteen-year piano teaching career, she moved to Arizona and built a book design business. She enjoys the lizards and desert heat in Arizona with her Border Collie, Padfoot, and her cat, Dixie Doodle.
“Life is what happens while you’re making plans.”–John Lennon
And I believe it. I make plans all the time, but they go to hell about 2 seconds after I make them.
That’s what totally frustrates me, Mark!
Planning seems overrated and too often doomed to fail.
I sorta feel like that, Charles. I’m afraid to plan, and afraid not to.
One of the biggest regrets of my life is that I have never been able to make plans and carry them out. For as long as I can remember I have been trying to survive, reacting to threats. The necessity of forever needing to find the money to pay the bills, in whatever way possible, in itself has precluded long range plans. So most of what has happened to me has been luck, or mischance. Sometimes I have helped myself by reacting intelligently, I guess, as when I managed to make a living freelancing after losing my job. But it would have been better had I decided to ditch the job years before and freelance. Nevertheless, I’m not complaining because, if only by accident, or fate or whatever, I am in a pretty good place right now. But it has been a weird, unpl;anned, haphazard kind of trip. Not what I would have expected.
I’m afraid of that regret, Eric, but I think the weird, haphazard sort of trip is what happens to a lot of us. I guess I’m going to go with the planning method, and I’ll let you know how it works out!
Hey Natasha. Like you, health tends to side track any long term plans I make, so I’ve learned to be a pantser … both in my writing and in my life.
One plan I do have is to be in New Orleans for my 50th Birthday this coming August/September. Beyond that … nope, no long term plans for me.
I hear you, Liz. I’m lucky now, really, but very leery of making plans.
Good luck with New Orleans! I hope it’s a wonderful birthday!
I saw this movie, too! I really liked it. I’m a major planner. Just thinking about not planning gives me a headache, an ulcer, and makes me constipated.
I loved it, Robin! That’s great, about the planning. I’m going to try that method, see what comes of it, LOL. It’s an experiment!
“Do you ever just want to throw up your hands and stop planning, because the Universe seems to have its own plan for you? “
Oh, Natasha, that’s where I’ve been for the past year. I finally gave up on planning and setting goals, because NOT ONE, and I mean it, NOT ONE of my plans have worked out for well over a year now. And it’s not just the big plans, either. If I think I’ll go to the store tomorrow, you can bet I’ll break a toe or get a flat tire. I’ve given up.
Now, whenever I’m tempted to do something, I write out 3 or 4 different ways it MIGHT be able to happen, then just sit back and see what actually happens. Never fails that it’s something completely unexpected that takes me in another direction.
I’ve started calling all plans/goals: “Things that I would like to do, and here is what looks like would work, but I don’t dare trust any of it.”
LOL, that’s a good name for a goal! That’s pretty much how I feel, but I’m trying to plan. I don’t know.
Maybe it just comes down to luck!
Great post! I cannot wait to see this movie! Proverbs 19:21 covers it for me–”Many are the plans in a (wo-)man’s heart, but it is the Lord’s will that prevails.” I kind of think that the longings we have inside us are part of our unique creation. When I was a teenager I had several specific desires and no great plan to accomplish any of them (I am so NOT a planner, never have been): learning another language to fluency, learning how to play the piano, getting a phd just because I liked the idea of going really deep with something, and living some part of my life in Europe. I am well launched in French and the piano, and got the phd somewhat accidentally (or so it seemed, right place-right time situation), so now I’m just kind of waiting to see what part of Europe I end up living in. Malcolm Gladwell has this great book called “Outliers” that explores the nature of proficiencies. Basically, if you do anything for ten years, you can become expert at it. (As a concert pianist, you know that this is true firsthand.) So, all these folks who seem to be so shockingly brilliant happen to have been in a situation (or created one) that allowed them to go very deep for an extended period of time. A fascinating book that I think every parent should read. Blessings (and serendipities) to all!
One more thing to balance out the story. I’m 45, starting to be on the looking-back side of life. In my 20s and 30s I wanted to be married so badly, and that bio clock sure was ticking, but it just wasn’t happening. I dated a lot of great guys, and I guess I could have married some of them just to procreate, but I was holding out for that sense of it being “right”. Finally, about a month after I turned 40, I met my husband on Match.com–it felt right on our first date, and on our first Valentine’s Day when we gave each other the exact same card, I knew he was “the one”. I had never believed that there was an ideal “one” out there for me, because I am a big fan of free will, but somehow Dennis seemed to be it. He had been married to someone else during most of my 20s and much of my 30s…it kind of makes me wish I could have known back then, so that I wouldn’t have spent so much time and energy on dating. But I thought I wanted kids, and that child-bearing window seems to be getting smaller and smaller. Now I have a niece and a nephew whose parents are divorcing, so it looks like I can work out my mothering instincts on other people’s kids. As a good friend of mine likes to say, “There’s a plan in there somewhere!”