Go ahead. Make plans.

It is my sincere hope that your wishes for the future become reality.

That being said…

To hell with them.

Though there is little wrong with trying to organize and navigate this life, you must understand your expectations are valued little in any scheme larger than yourself. You may hold influence. You may even hold great influence. You may have a very neat calendar, and likely should. But if by twenty-five, none of the occurrences you planned had come to fruition and some void made of disappointment grows in your soul, I cannot seem to drum up the sympathy for you. And any younger version of yourself would likely feel the same. If such is your way, you have set thine self up to be let down. The best laid plans of mice and men, and dolphins, are worth shit to the universe.

And do not misunderstand, this is not an advocating stance for the ideology of fate either. I do enjoy the idea, and perhaps it does occur, here and there. Fate usually drips with the idea of romance, so humans, and particularly young ones, find it divine. Destiny for the course of your life, as though it were set in the stars. You can almost see it in lights. It’s all very grand and appealing, and I hope the best for fate, as I did with your plans. But off to hell they shall go.

And it is not that I think that the universe is against the idea of plans. But, I don’t think the universe is a very good planner. After all, since the beginning as far as the smart folks can tell us, it has been chaotic energy screaming out to as far as its seemingly ever extending reach can go. And we’re lucky, or accidental enough to be along for the ride.

So, what are we lonely upright sapiens to do?

Passively endure whatever comes our way? Or do we fight, no matter how futile? Is there a plan outside of our own? Do our plans hold a weight stronger than we can grasp?

If you were hoping for the answer, I am here to disappoint.

I do not have ‘the’ answer. I have only gathered a few at least half-truths and solutions. But I can tell you that most of that knowledge has not come from when all my plans unfold as I dreamt they would, years ago. Quite the opposite, actually. The instances that lead to the most knowledge have been those that this feeble human mind could not have imagined. The more doomed something made my plans, the more I ended up growing from it. I speak for myself, but my madness lends me to believe I am not the only one who can say such statements. Most folks, I reckon, can find the same in their own timeline, if they are willing to look.

But.

That does not put your humble writer in a passive position. Action begets action. And on my way to watching plans fail, most of the life that I’ve had worth remembering was going on.

Some of it grand. Love. Friendships. Parenthood.

Some horrid. Heartbreak. Conflict. And the tragedy of watching the youth you once, foolishly, believed endless, drain from your hands to pile back upon the earth.

Each deviation taught. And the harder the turn, usually the more value. If you know how to use it, disappointment can make you quite nimble.

And to further confuse my point of view, somehow, I still hold plans to where my life shall go. And they have no difference much more than in execution method. So, a fool, I may very well be.

But waiting for something to happen lacks energy. And without exporting some, you cannot maintain import. If you want a life worth living, you must go out and at least guess which direction to go. Which is easy for us humans. We have a very lovely balance of cognitive gymnastics and instinct driven behavior.

For example, despite a variance of sexualities, this species is still reproducing with the original hardware at an expansive rate, which lends to prominence of primitive genetic preprogramming still being quite present in the gene pool.

But.

We humans love. And love hard.

We have all sorts of love in this world, from the grandest of instantaneous beauty, to the complex and demanding, to the poetically desperate. We even have well aged love, the sort that lasts well beyond most feelings of any type of sexuality.

And that’s just the romantic variety. We extensively fill ourselves with plutonic, parental, sororal, fraternal and boatloads more.

But that is just one display of the passion that creates action. And action, thus far, seems to be the most effective way that the human condition initiates development. We go out into this world, bump around each other trying to see what’s there, and then take it all back for some introspection. It sculpts the next day, if you’re willing, or dooms you, if you will not. Most of everything was here before us, and the rest of it will come after.

And such concludes the scientific portion of the lecture. Now on to the Humanities.

Because hope lives in my heart. And I yearn for the truth of fate. If I did not, you could best believe I would not be spending my time typing away as I do.

For I believe that the actions of sentient folk do hold influence that can be large from our small perspectives. What you do does matter. Sure, it may not create stars or halt disasters, but we have proven over and over to ourselves that we can hold even the slightest control on the workings of a global society. You can choose to help or hurt or do nothing, each of which disturbs the ripples of local existence, at the very least. We’ve even gotten so good at toying with the very matter of the universe, that we can alter the shape and scope and swirl of the natural world.

So, I suppose I say plan vaguely. Have hope, but do not rely on it. And if you’re going to fight, go with intelligence enough to match strength.

Because even if you believe in something like the fate of love, you must be out in the world enough to meet another being willing to give it a try.

Because if you want great things in your life, you must try to be something great along the way.