Back in high school, my best friend and I had a pretty standard Saturday night routine. It wasn’t dramatic or exciting, but it worked for us. It involved some arrangement of the following activities: Eating at some fast food place, feeding quarters into video games at an arcade, seeing a movie at one of our regular theaters, then renting a video somewhere to watch back at my house while packing away some Doritos, Dr. Pepper, and Mountain Dew. Yeah, we were nerds, but I’ll be damned if we weren’t happy ones.
I picked up a philosophy of life from him throughout the months of Saturdays and thousands of suburban miles we shared. One night while driving through what passed for the affluent part of our hometown, we were talking about graduation parties and he introduced the following idea into our meandering conversation: “Don’t ever plan in too much detail. That way you won’t be disappointed when things don’t happen the way you want.”
That might seem objectively pessimistic, but in context it makes perfect sense, and I will argue even today that he had a legitimate point. He wasn’t saying to expect things will always go south regardless, or that you should never try to make something good happen. His point was how easy it is for people to get wrapped up in over-planning the details of whatever they had going on, hoping to arrange events that will live up to nearly unattainable ideals. If you spend all your time worrying about getting things set up and making sure they’re perfect, one thing going wrong can be enough to drag on the happiness and satisfaction you might otherwise experience, and make all of the stress that came with the preparation a waste of time and energy.
Example: Whenever I visit my friends in Seattle, I never go with a checklist of things I absolutely have to do while there (other than buy some smoked salmon to ship home). I’ve always been perfectly agreeable to whatever they might suggest, and have let my experiences there build into memories I never could have anticipated or planned. Without this absence of planning, I wouldn’t know anything about Boom City, Port Townsend, or the Poulsbo street fair. Conversely, I can think of far too many times I’ve planned out elaborate lessons with way too many moving parts that I was sure would be huge successes, only to be stuck biting back at the frustration and anger I felt when things didn’t work out.
With this in mind, I’ve decided to put aside any effort to make my 50th birthday into an event. Instead I’m going to just take the month to reflect on things here in my May blog posts, and let anything else associated with my birthday either happen or not. (I’m not planting any seeds about surprise parties in saying this, by the way; God help anyone who would ever try going that direction with me, and I literally could not be more serious.) When I say I’m just going to let things happen, that’s what I mean. It’s more important to me to have the day pass and not feel disappointed about it than it is to put together some kind of memory-making bash.
The memories will take care of themselves. Maybe they don’t have to be spectacular because I’m landing on a decade number this year. Maybe something will sprout up and make the day landmark-worthy.
Or maybe I’ll just go see Infinity War again after school that day, and be home in bed by 9:00. I ain’t gettin’ any younger, you know….
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