SOLSC '23 Day 8: To plan, or not to plan

 

I am a planner.  I think it comes with the territory--hello, teacher planning periods?  Year-at-a-glance curricula?  Spiral reviews and testing season?  My library gig involves even more planning--book fairs, author visits, inventory.

The planning has long bled over into my personal life, too.  Paper calendars and spiral agendas are almost always at hand.  I have stickers, color coded goals, and morning routines mapped out week by week.  It doesn't take much digging into my psyche to find a hidden need to control, document, make sense of my life.  (Also a need to write something down if I have to remember it--too many drawers are open in my brain's filing cabinets most days.)  Not that I accomplish everything I set out to do, but checking off what does get done is validating.

That sense of control is false, of course.  The extremely premature birth of my firstborn three decades ago was a shocking reminder of that, one that kept me from touching any kind of planner for over a year.  Instead, I documented her medical victories in the tiniest print in her baby book that wasn't meant to accommodate an extra three months out of the womb, living day to day based on doctors' prognoses.

The planning bug didn't go away, though, especially as we added another child with more appointments to keep and two working parents' jobs to juggle.  The kitchen calendar was front and center, but so was my weekly agenda, mapped out each Sunday to make sure we got to the dentist and t-ball practice, then teacher conferences and band performances.  Getting another degree in the midst of all that necessitated homework planning, too.

The kids are now grown, so you'd think the planning has pared down.  Instead, I've gotten a bit ridiculous with it all.  I have a quarterly goal setting planner, a personalized weekly/ monthly planner, and just started a bullet journal to keep track of my healthcare journey.  (I really need to catch up in that last one.)   I thought I was simply honing my skills when I read a passage from Brene Brown's The Gifts of Imperfection that hit me so hard I had to reread it several times. She writes that instead of dealing with the discomfort and pain in life, we

"... make it go away.  We do that by numbing and taking the edge off the pain with whatever provides the quickest relief.  We can anesthetize with a whole bunch of stuff, including alcohol, drugs, food, sex, relationships, money, work, caretaking, gambling, staying busy, affairs, chaos, shopping, planning, perfectionism, constant change, and the Internet." (p.70) 

Did you catch that?  "Planning" was part of that list.  It made me start thinking about my ratio of time spent planning vs doing, the goals that I tend to repeat over and over, steps dutifully color-coded and outlined in my customized planner but never completed.  Am I just throwing seeds around hoping they'll grow, instead of doing the real work of tilling and amending the soil and getting to the roots of the whats and whys of my behavior?  

Time to do some more digging...