I was making some plans for a day trip, doing the research, the leg work, the planning, all the while imagining what a fun time I would have. Just as I caught myself looking forward to my trip, I realized that all the ‘looking forward to’ things that I do, all the effort I put into making them happen, relies on a pretty faulty assumption: That what I imagined will happen is what will actually happen. That the world will look the way I want it to, the way I have prepared for it to look. That if I push and pull the ‘right’ levers, accumulate the right resources, do the right planning, bring the right skills and smarts to the table, I can bring the outcome I envision to fruition. This is why I plan, and this is why I look forward to my plan, because in my mind, every trip I am planning is a fun filled, but safe, adventure that goes off without a hitch.

The problem of course is I really can’t know what the future will be. The evidence of this is abundant – no trip I have ever gone on, no matter the care or the planning – has unfolded without at least a few challenges and unpleasant surprises I needed to adjust to and navigate around. Sure, sometimes it’s just a matter of switching hotels, or rebooking a canceled tour. But there have also been dangers, injury, an unpleasant run-in with a rhino in Kenya…

If I had known I was going to get run down by a rhino in Kenya, if I had imagined that my safari adventure would have included a near death experience and the potential need for medical care in the middle of the African savannah, I obviously would have planned a different trip. At a minimum, I sure wouldn’t have spent all those months of safari planning looking forward to my trip.

But I did do the planning for the Kenya trip — I chose the destination, the guide, I spent the money to make my trip a reality, I assumed that as I pulled those levers, I was in control, I was shaping the future I had looked forward to. Clearly, I was deeply mistaken. I don’t actually know shit about how the future is going to be. Everyday things turn out differently than I thought they would, then expected. So why this confidence in my version of the future? Why allow myself to get wrapped up in fantasies of how thing will be, of what I look forward to, when all those fantasies do is keep me struggling for what’s next while enduring the suffering of what is here and now?