HATCHING YOUR GRAND PLAN, by Amy Nolan
Human beings can no longer make decisions. We have become so inept we have taken to outsourcing all of our major life choices. Case in point: Life Coaches. They assist us to time manage, fi nd direction and make choices that people in previous generations just got on with. Our sense of individualism has reached such epic proportions we are terrifi ed that we may not live fully actualised lives, own big enough houses or drive big enough cars. If you want a good life, you are told to plan for it.

It’s all about the plan. There’s the fi nancial plan, the life plan, the wedding plan, the holiday plan, and of course the funeral plan. Heaven forbid your cheapskate family book a shitty covers band for the wake and bury you in a cardboard box. Plans are all about taking control and ensuring you get the life you believe you deserve. But life isn’t like that. Life is a furry beast with a mind of its own.

Having a plan offers the same security as a saddle. You may stay on your horse for longer but there’s no guarantee that she ain’t gonna take you out at the fi rst branch she comes to. Life is random. Life is chaotic. Life does not go to plan. That’s what I love about it. Planning is for dickheads with no sense of adventure. I’ll admit it, I have succumbed to the plan. When I had my fi rst child I joined a pregnancy support group and under the advice of the attendant midwife I wrote a birth plan.

The birth plan included a best top 10 cervical dilation hits play list (including Push It and Like a Virgin), assorted oils for rubbing into my sacrum, requests for a drug free birth (which was ironic because to date I had lived a drug fi lled life), candles, heat bags, and magical affi rmations. As it turned out I went crazy on the stink of jasmine, told my partner to get the fuck out of my face and demanded Pethidine.

Babies make such distinct and different entries into the world, foot fi rst, arm fi rst, head jammed in the pelvis, half an hour in the car, blue with the cord around the neck, 39 hours in second stage… the fact that I had a fucking plan refl ected my complete ignorance. There is only one birth plan: Get the baby out. This leads me to why my angst has turned against the plan. Just when you thought people couldn’t get any frigging stupider, in walks the Baby Planner. These are people who help indulgent middle class couples plan for their sprog.

The mere existence of the Baby Planner van in the driveway should be an indicator that these people should not breed, lest they produce a killer strain of accountants or fi nancial planners. You aren’t supposed to be able to afford a baby. Having a baby is the most expensive, time consuming, exhausting, unpredictable and energy draining thing you will ever do in your life.

The baby bonus isn’t a government gift. It’s a compensation payout for the years of hardship to come. What does a baby planner actually do? ‘Mate, you sit there and relax while I knock up your wife.’ If all pregnancies were planned then most of us wouldn’t exist. I was unplanned. Most of my children were unplanned.

I live an unplanned life. It’s wonderful. Nothing in my life never goes to plan because I don’t have one. It’s chaos, but I think you’ll fi nd it’s more aligned with the nature of life. Life is an accident. All you have to do is respond. Eat the plan.

Tags: Amy Nolan, making plans, planning

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 12:53 am and is filed under Self-help, Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.