There is no Plan

I've just been flipping through Colin's blog and came across his essay Paved with Good Intentions.

If you're Singaporean, go read it; if you're not, read it anyway.

I find my reaction to it quite strange; I tried to opt out of the Singapore Plan at age 6 and thanks to a gigantic amount of luck and help from parents, managed to at least partially escape. Yes, 6. When I refused to speak Mandarin at Nanyang Kindergarten (one of the more Chinese schools in Singapore), my father parachuted me out to the International School of Singapore.

That's when I suppose I started being a pushy little bastard -- if opting out to do your own thing worked then, well, it should work now.

But all the same I still bought into the whole Plan; the idea that as long as you get good grades, everything will fall into your lap by virtue of your brilliant examination taking skills. That so long as you do well at school, get a good job, stick to the plan, everything will work out.

Well, that's not true.

I won't go into the gory details, but stuff happened that derailed me from my Plan. Things got very interesting when I was 16, all the way up till I was 26. 10 painfully unhappy years, which finally made me understand that for me at least, there is no Plan that will shape all the rest of your life; that there is only the plan that you make as events happen. That to try to Plan your future and fix it in stone and try desperately to make events fit your Plan is futile.

The reason I understood this? Tiffany rings. Which will mean little to anyone but those who already know.

Some people may benefit from a Plan. Good for them. I think though that the vast majority will not; and that those who believe their Plan will keep them happy may never really be happy. If they were, Singaporeans wouldn't be constantly searching for happiness (click on regions).

At dinner last night, Kevin mentioned something to the effect that I operate in binary mode. Either I'm off, disengaged, purring along half asleep; or I'm on, kicked down, exploding down the highway. Most of the time I'm off -- but it's those sudden bursts when the throttle is all the way down that ensure I'll never have some simple plan for life. Those bursts of excitement and passion upset the Plan, and lead me down roads I'd never have expected to go before. But I wouldn't have it any other way.

Would you?

P.S. I'm writing this on 24 hours of no sleep in preparation for the time zone shift. Rambling, bouncing here and there, warts, toadstools and all. Maybe I'll be more coherent once I've spent my first night's sleep in Stockholm; I certainly hope so.