It’s easy to plan. Planning is a sign of hope and determination for the quality of our lives and for the world around us. We’re always planning something; our days, our weeks, our futures. We find comfort in lists and itineraries and knowing that we know what needs to happen and when it needs to be done. Our short term plans give us peace of mind and our long term plans give us goals to work for and motivation to carry on.

But here’s the thing about plans: they rarely go the way you have accounted for them to. There are roadblocks and obstacles that make your plans difficult, sometimes even impossible to accomplish. You may find that the path you have traced for yourself is no longer viable. The hours of envisioning your future were hours wasted, and the goals that you’ve set are just shadows of your past plans. You’re left standing with no path to follow, and a desperate need to come up with a new one soon.

I’ve always been a planner. I take pride in my color coded calendar; making lists calms me down. Up until recently, I could lay out my 10-Year-Plan for you in a matter of seconds, complete with small details like what street my future apartment would be on, and what my dog’s name would be (just in case you were wondering, it would be Pamplemousse, which is the French word for grapefruit, but would be nicknamed Mousse. This is the only French word I remember from my three years of foreign language classes in high school.)

But then came the road block. My dream of attending a university to pursue an acting degree was cut short when I was faced with a lot of rejection, and not a lot of financial aid. All I had wanted, since I was little, was to be an actress, and now I saw no way to do that. During one of my many, many self inflicted pity parties, my mom said something to me that has since become something that has guided me.

“You just need to redirect,” she told me, “just because it’s not going to happen according to plan, doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to happen.”

So I started to redirect. I realized that my passion didn’t just stop at acting, but instead involved the entire industry of theatre. Once I stepped back and actually looked at the possibility of the future, I realized that there is so much more to the world that I love than what I had been doing; so many opportunities I had not yet taken advantage of. I realized that I had been so stuck on this path that I didn’t even have my eyes open to all the other paths around me. They might not all have a clear direction, but they were all paths, nonetheless.

There are plenty of places to go in the world, and plenty of ways to get to each place. We have to be aware of the things that happen in our lives that may require us to doctor our paths, or even get on a new route completely. Sometimes the plans we didn't plan on are the ones that we love the most and feel most like home.