Plans, something we all make before we put things into action. Be it a rough outline of how you’ll spend your weekend or a detailed hour by hour breakdown of that perfect dream vacation. There is hardly anything we do without making a plan. A daily list, weekly to-do, monthly goals, yearly goals, 5-year goals. We all strategically plan and organize our to-do or to-achieve lists.
But sometimes, what we have in mind doesn’t always happen. The plans we make get disturbed or, we can say that things don’t go according to our plans sometimes.
Last month, my department was celebrating Physiotherapy Day and Teacher’s Day together and I was the anchor for the show. I had been up past midnight planning and writing down my entire script the night before. I had everything planned out—the sequence of events, the dialogues, the jokes, the memories with each of the teachers that I wanted to talk about, games— EVERYTHING. But the next day, NOTHING went according to my plan.
When I reached the auditorium, I got to know that the Vice-Chancellor might come to watch the event and so the department decided to let one of the teachers handle the Physiotherapy Day celebration. By the time the celebration for Physiotherapy Day was over, we had only 40 minutes until the auditorium closed. One of our professors had become upset and left due to some reason and the students were still having refreshments.
We couldn’t start without all the teachers present. The person whose performance could have been shifted in the beginning was nowhere to be found. My HOD was angry since we were running short on time. On top of that, as soon as I decided that we can’t wait any longer and the professor who had left can join us a few minutes into the celebration, and I picked up the mic to begin, the mic didn’t work. We tried for 10 minutes, to no avail.
That was the moment when I took a breath and decided I would have to do this show without the mic. And so, I started. And if all of this wasn’t enough, it started raining as well too. It was raining so hard, it became almost impossible to hear me above all that noise. I left my place from the podium and walked to the centre of the stage and almost SHOUTED the entire (now unscripted) script off.
I told you all this because NOTHING that day went according to the plan. Nothing. Everything I had spent hours working on the previous night got washed down like clay in rain. The only thing that didn’t let me give up was, that it was MY event. I wanted to do the anchoring. I wanted to be the one to share my experiences and memories and guide the events of the celebration. Everything else was just secondary obstacles.
Sometimes, things will not go according to your plans, things will take a detour and everything will feel like it’s falling apart instead of coming together. But you have to remember that YOU are the one driving the car of your life. YOU are the one taking yourself places, YOU hold the reins of your trying-to-run-wild horses. Your plans might fail you, you will have to take impromptu decisions. They might not be easy to make, but those decisions will hold the key to the door that will give you a head-start in life.
Kritika
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Very well written..👍