As little girls we play dress up and put on princess dresses, nurse costumes, pretend to be a vet, a cowgirl, a dog walker, a teacher, and anything else we could think of. Somewhere in our minds we had an idea of what we wanted to be when we grew up. When I was in third grade, I was in love with Hillary Duff. Because I adored her so much, I wanted to be a singer. I had it all planned out: I was going to dress just like her and have my own line of clothes at Kohl’s. Since then, of course, my plan has changed. But why do I always have to have a plan?
I am a person who loves her planner, labels everything, keeps a first aid kit in her car and makes her bed (almost) every morning. I like to have my duties written out. I am organized, I like to come prepared and I have a routine. As much as I talk about wanting to be adventurous, I’m not. I freak out when I don’t have a time schedule to follow or a list to scratch off. That’s how I live my life.
8:00 – wake up
8:03 – get dressed
8:04 – brush teeth
8:06 - put on deodorant
... And so on throughout the day. I plan out my day in head and try to imagine what to do if something goes wrong and how to work around it. The thing is, I don’t need to have every minute of my life planned out. Thanks to Pinterest, girls are planning out every detail of their lives: what tattoo to get, what colors for her wedding, the gallery wall in her suburban house with her three kids and two dogs, how to afford the city apartment she wants while in her 20's, and the dinner she’s going to put on the table after coming home from her steady paying job and welcomes her nicely dressed husband as he walks through the door.
You can’t read that and not think it sounds just a little bit creepy. We can pin all the cute pins we want, but what actually happens in our lives is up to us, not the internet. We will handle those decisions when the time comes. Yes, you may know that you want to get married and have kids and live in the suburbs, but it’ll be okay if it doesn’t work out exactly that way. If you want one girl and one boy, but end up with two boys, are you going to send one back? I would hope not.
I have a friend who drives me crazy, but one thing I admire about him is the fact that he just lives. He doesn’t plan, he doesn’t worry, he doesn’t get mad, and he shows up when you would least expect it — he just lives. I’m a planner and he’s not. It’s hard for me to “go with the flow” sometimes because I don’t want to be late or I pitch a fit because the icing on the cookie cake isn’t the shade of pink I thought it was going to be. Some things aren’t worth getting upset over, and some things need to be left alone.
Life isn’t something you can plan out. Sometimes it’s best to sit back and let everything work out on its own. Although Pinterest does come in handy, we don’t need to use it to plan out the baby room we aren’t even close to having or what we will have for lunch tomorrow. Let’s be daring and spontaneous for once instead of planning out what time to put our shoes on.
“You can devise all the plans in the world, but if you don’t welcome spontaneity; you will just disappoint yourself.” ― Abigail Biddinger
