The Plan Is No Longer Relevant

I am a lifelong traveler and adventure seeker.  My wife is the same.  Our long term goal is to travel as much as possible and experience as much as possible.  At whatever erratic interval that we see old friends or distant family we have to field the “What is your plan?” line of questioning.  If I am feeling feisty, I channel my inner anarchist and toss out “Do I look like the kind of person who has a plan?”  When I am behaving myself, the answer is that we don’t have a plan.  We used to have plans and we weren’t happy.  We were so focused on THE PLAN that more often than not, we missed what was truly important. 

Scrubbing Bubbles

I have a statement that will send older generations into spasms – The PLAN is not the most important thing in life.  It doesn’t even break the top ten.  This is not a new idea.  My favorite fictional character of all time, Zorba, was not a planner.  More recently, this theme has been studied in depth in the movie Fight Club.  Zorba would have mopped the floor with Tyler Durden, I would like to point out.

What lengths are necessary to escape The Plan?  For me, it was the death of a parent.  My mother was an incandescent soul.  Don’t get me wrong, she had faults just like the rest of us.  I am neither excusing nor ignoring that she was imperfect.  But when it came down to it, she had a great love of life.  Whether she was scuba diving along the coast of Kauai and touring the Northwest with my father or running through museums and riding every damn train that I could possibly find through the UK, she was adventurous and loved life. 

I want to grow up to be this kind of person

My mom toed the line – career, family, kids, house, dog, cat.  She managed to cram as much life into her life as possible.  Where it is an all too common story that life becomes a never-ending to do list, she defied that doom and enriched my father’s and my lives while she was at it.  She could never be accused of not living a full life, even when it ran much shorter than anyone expected.  During the years that my mom was ill, I tried to do what I felt was important and still maintain the plan.

I continued my career in New York for a year.  After the year, it was clear to me that I wasn’t able to split my focus anymore.  Molly and I left New York and we moved back to Idaho.  I thought that I could manage my career and still lend support and spend time with family.  My job search tended to resemble Jason Seigel’s in The Five Year Engagement.  I didn’t quite get laughed out of restaurants for the decision I had made, but it was close.  I had even researched opening a restaurant and when the potential investors fell through (wisely on their part) filed away the project. 

In time, I found a job as a chef at an excellent restaurant.  Molly had a much more difficult time finding meaningful work and it was stressful and disheartening for her.  Eventually we got on our feet and began some semblance of life again.  We were back on track with The Plan and were (geographically) close to my family. 

My mom, meanwhile, was trending towards improved health.  This was the last true upswing that she experienced.  She and my dad celebrated by traveling to Hawaii and Costa Rica.  During the time in Costa Rica she began to experience gastrointestinal issues.  This continued and while I blithely signed on to being the operating partner in a new venture, her cancer came back out of remission. 

Cute Couples, eh?

According to The Plan, I was eventually supposed to branch out and become The Chef.  I was young enough and had the work ethic and skill set to become a Big Deal.  Instead of being with my parents as they struggled through another round of Chemotherapy I put myself and my wife inside a 120 degree metal box with our livelihood and welfare dependent on the success of said metal box.  Why?  Because it fit The Plan.  I worked 90-100 hour weeks, Molly put in 50-60 hour weeks (20+ of those hours unpaid each week), drove us into debt supporting a business that was unsupportable and came within a hair’s breadth of destroying my marriage.  All in the name of The Plan.

My parents struggled through the surgery and chemotherapy without me again.  I might as well have been in New York for all the good having me near was doing.  The cancer went into remission again and because I am incapable of learning my lesson, I took the Executive Chef position for a restaurant group in Boise.  Instead of minimizing my time commitments and stress, I had just doubled down.  I was now in charge of two restaurants with weekly changing menus and a total of five service periods.  Saturdays and Sundays it was not uncommon for me to work from 7am until Midnight. 

Now if this was a Lifetime Movie, what would happen next?  That’s right, the cancer came back.  And for a third time, my family went through Chemo without me.  One of the few good things about my new position was that the restaurants were 8 blocks from the hospital where my mom went through her treatments.  I was able to leave work and go to meetings and occasionally visit my mom in her hospital room. 

Goes for relationships, too

This time the cancer didn’t go away.  There was no remission.  I was still putting in 70-80 hour weeks and working 6-7 days a week.  It didn’t matter that my family and my marriage were going off the rails, technically my life was still going according to The Plan.  When the announcement was made that my mother’s cancer was terminal, I was in shock.  I had been in Idaho for nearly three years at this point but had never done what I moved there to do.  That week my mother confided in me that she wanted to see the ocean one last time.  I was adamant.  I was going to take her to see the ocean again.  It didn’t matter if we had to leave the next day, we were going to make it happen.

I told my job that I was going to take time off.  They were very gracious and told me to take whatever time I needed.  I tried to plan an excursion to the coast.  It is only a seven hour drive from Caldwell after all.  But it was too late.  My mom deteriorated so quickly that it wasn’t feasible to even make an overnight trip.  I shifted gears and we were going to go to McCall one last time.  McCall was having a very dry summer and there were forest fires running rampant through the area, closing down the highway and at bare minimum, the air quality was bright, flaming red.  We couldn’t go to McCall. 

Honorary Son

I had nearly three years to do these things and they were all too late.  I ended up taking a week off work and spending it in the chair next to her bed.  This is what The Plan had given me.  I had run my marriage into the ground and wasted the last years of my mother’s life.  I had broken the next to last promise that I made to my mom.  What had I gotten out of it?  I won some awards.  Made a name for myself.  Garnered national acclaim.  The cost was far too high.

During one of my mother’s more lucid times in hospice, we had a conversation about my life at that time.  She was proud of me and all I had accomplished, but she didn’t like how I treated Molly.  I promised to take better care of Molly, my relationship, and my marriage.  This is the last promise that I made to my mom.

What can be more important than experiencing this?

When asked what she wants to do with her life, Molly will say “Travel the World.”  We work hard.  We live well within our means.  We scrimp and save.  But the money doesn’t go to a 401(k) or a Roth IRA.  It definitely doesn’t go towards some ephemeral retirement 30 years in the future.  The money goes to the next move.  The next trip.  The next adventure.  Where will we be going?  Not even we know.  But you better believe that when we do take off on another “trip of a lifetime”, everything will be going according to plan.