Living Plan B

Each class meeting at UIndy, I’m surrounded by young students who are busy completing college degrees, planning for, and creating their careers and life pathways:  Plan A.  I am not in their sync.  I have experienced my “A Cycle” and am in my “Plan B.”

Plan B is the gift we receive when Plan A, the life one lives to fulfill the expectations of parents, husbands, friends and extended family, church, and society falls through.  If we are fortunate enough to have tragedy in our lives to the point where we are smacked down and circumstances snatch Plan A from us to the point of making life irretrievable, we make a Plan B, a second life.  If we are somehow aware enough to consider before plunging into a second life, or Plan A, Part II, we grow and learn from the self-inflicted shortcomings of our first life, creating a true Plan B: a balanced, considered, second life.

So, what is a considered life?  Anything considered is carefully thought through, studied, and reflected upon.  A life lived in order to fulfill ones’ purpose on this earth.  It is the acting upon the answers one receives from her own soul, the intuition that is buried deep within us.   By our very nature, we stray from our given path.  We ignore our inner voice, the only one we can truly trust to reveal the truth.  We act and react, holding fast to chaotic business until a crisis forces reflection or self-study.  For most of us, our daily lives annihilate any possible chance for a considered life.  We work a job, raise kids, hold a marriage together, feed, clothe, and exercise our bodies, and if there’s any time left, we may develop friendships and hobbies.  Time for consideration is lost unless we grab it for ourselves.  A considered life, by definition, the fulfillment availed by the investment of time and energy inward, does not just happen.

Perhaps this is best expressed by the following quotation from a fellow cancer survivor:

“I am talking here about the need for every woman to live a considered life.  The necessity for that consideration grows and deepens as one faces directly one’s own mortality and death.  Self scrutiny and evaluation of our lives, while painful, can be rewarding and strengthening journey toward a deeper self.”

Audre Lorde,   The Cancer Journals