Last weekend's planning fiasco made me ponder my attitude to planning and life in general. There seem to be two very different personality types, the planner and the improviser. I'm very much the latter.
I don't want my life to feel like ticking off a grocery shopping list. Executing a never ending todo list, comparing each new experience with my expectations for it. Better to be surprised every day and enjoy it. I saw a terribly depressing drawing once: rows of little boxes, 12 to a row, 80 rows. Those represent the months in your life. Cross off the first bunch according to your age. A very sobering countdown... Better stick to schedule, get your diploma, get married quick and get it over with! Hurry!
Instead I try to preserve the optimism of a child that each day will never end, I'm invincible and everything is still possible. Change the world as you once wanted to.
I don't want to know the weather forecast - I want to go out and have fun regardless.
I love imagining being an explorer, being the first to discover the area I'm in. How it must have been like without any traces of humanity, no footsteps to follow. That experience gets completely destroyed by overloading the travel guide with post-its and slavishly following a tight schedule.
That dreaded interview question: Where do you see yourself in 5 years? I don't. I'm enjoying myself right now, why should I envision myself to be somewhere/somebody else? And no, this does not imply I'm without ambitions ;-)
Retirement planning, better do what you want to do now. If you see an opening, get a chance, seize it. Don't wait for something better or more safe to come along, it might never happen.
I find plans to be incredibly restraining and burdensome.
TL;DR: Live today - you might not be around tomorrow.
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