suspended development

The future is a tough nut to crack.  Think about it too little, and you're in for a rough time when those bills come due.  Think about it too much, and you'll drive yourself mad trying to account for every niggling potentiality.  You need to find that pleasant middle ground where you've put in your due diligence about the future, but remain comfortable with the reality that surprises are in store.

I've driven myself mad, of course.  From an early age, I felt the constant need to be in control, to foresee and manipulate events such that nothing would befall me but what I'd intended.  I convinced myself that I sat, comfortably ensconced, at the center of a vest and intricate web of control, and I could tug on a thread just so, and see reality unfold itself to my whims.  No impulsive decisions, no hint of spontaneity, no single possibly meaningful decision taken without days or weeks of prior consideration.  It's not a healthy way to live.

The whole point is to foresee and avoid catastrophically traumatizing events, but they are, by their very nature, unforeseeable.  So you can only sustain that kind of mindset for so long before one of those unexpectable, unstoppable disasters hits, and your entire world explodes.  Everything you did was for naught.  Life...finds a way.

The bag you've held so carefully tips and falls, and you lose your marbles all over the floor, watching in mute horror as they roll into every unexplored crevice of your mind, activating things better left hidden.  And when it's all finished, and you're left to take stock of the new layout, and try to feel your way around without falling, the topography of the area is fundamentally changed.  And nothing's putting those marbles back in that bag.

Which is to say, I'm a lot more easygoing about what's coming down the road these days.  If you'd ask me, say, ten years ago how I'd feel about approaching a situation without a firm plan in mind, I'd tell you that you'd have to be completely insane.  Now I'm there, and it seems like a totally reasonable thing not to expect every outcome to be known well in advance.

Granted, I'm probably just gravitating towards the mean, here.  This probably doesn't seem like much of a revelation to you.  But then, I was always very good at keeping it all together.  I didn't maintain a belief in my own relative omnipotence for so long by being bad at it.  But it does mean, when the time came, I had a lot further to fall.