Tag Archives: Planning

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It’s the End of the World as We Know It, and I Feel…

Annoyed, to be honest. I admit, part of my annoyance is selfish because next week is our spring break. Thank goodness we’re not big spring break travelers, but I did have quite a few activities planned for our stay-cation, and I don’t know how many of them we’ll actually get to do because people have lost their heads, and everything is closing. My younger son was looking forward to seeing the dinosaur exhibit at our zoo, but now that’s not going to happen. Even some Florida beaches are closed, and although I’m about the last person you’ll ever see on a beach, restricting people from the outdoors, from fresh air and sun, seems like one of the worst ideas to me. (Read about sun therapy here, and thanks to Heather for sharing it to begin with.)

As a planner, I’m always the first to sign up for things, but that one got me hard this week when a race my elder son participates in every year (and placed second in last year) was cancelled. No make-up date, no refunds. I’m grateful I didn’t pre-purchase anything for the upcoming week (mainly because I wasn’t sure when my husband would be able to take off work and join us). Now, if we’re able to do anything, I’ll pay on-site.

I understand closing Disney World for 14 days. That should be enough time to ensure that any possible lingering virus in the air is gone, and when it re-opens, I am sure there will be all kinds of measures in place to ensure guests are virus-free. Likewise, I get postponing events that attract a lot of people and suspending activities like my kids’ baseball practices and games until early April. Sometimes you have to use precautions like these to save people from themselves. But cancelling the rest of the NBA’s season? Couldn’t they just come back in early April like everyone else (after ensuring all players are well) and extend it a couple weeks? May I remind you that the NBA didn’t let Magic Johnson’s HIV diagnosis stop them.

TP-meme1And then there’s the absolute absurdity of the toilet paper shortage. Even though I think over-publicity has to do with much of the pandemonium we’re experiencing, this one even baffled the news anchors on the local new station I watch every morning. “We didn’t say it was that kind of a virus,” one of them said the other day. What idiot decided that this was the hot commodity everyone had to have, and why did the rest of the country buy into it? Hand sanitizer I get—even bleach—but TP? I’m scratching my head over that one and just grateful that I had a coupon a few weeks ago and bought in bulk. If you need toilet paper, skip the crazy, and come to my house; I will be glad to give you some.

I went grocery shopping today, and at my first stop, there was plenty of everything (even a pretty good selection of toilet paper still on the shelves). At the entrance to the store, though, the station with sanitary wipes for grocery cart handles was missing. I waited with a couple other customers while a store employee replaced them. The worker explained that they have to replace the wipes every couple hours because people are pulling out wipe after wipe, storing them in bags, and taking them home. She also said that one woman was in the bathroom, filling a bottle with soap from the store’s soap dispenser, and another was taking toilet paper from the stalls—when there was plenty of toilet paper on the shelves! And this was the best of the four stores I visited. As a writer, I have a kind of morbid fascination with people watching, but the insanity I witnessed today is the precursor to people self-destructing. If something like an actual zombie apocalypse were to ever happen, I fear the level of hysteria would be even worse than what our most far-fetched movies depict.

Which brings me to what really bothers me about this Coronavirus debacle—the impact on our economy. People have made it obvious that they’re willing to steal items that are both cheap and available, but aside from this abhorrent behavior, what about those sole proprietors and small businesses that are losing business because people are now too scared to go about their daily lives (albeit a little more cautiously)? Even with measures put in place to ensure workers are paid when businesses close (like at Disney), some businesses are so small that they can’t afford this. How can a private music teacher, for instance, pay herself when her students have been scared into staying at home?

Our world has suffered worse pandemics. Yes, people traveling and not knowing they had Coronavirus helped it spread globally, but people seem to be forgetting about the regular diseases that are always around and are more contagious and have a higher mortality rate. No one is flipping out about them. The flu has killed—and will continue to kill—people for years, and we’re just like, Stay home. Drink plenty of fluids. For that matter, I’m more worried about leaving my house and getting hit by a drunk driver than being sneezed on by someone who might be sick—and I have an autoimmune disease, people.

You may think I’m not taking this seriously, but I do care. I count the seconds now when I wash my hands—and send my kids back to the bathroom to make sure they do the same. We’re gearing up for at least two weeks at home (after spring break, they’ll be engaged in distance learning because life has to go on), and what that looks like is a little self-discipline to make sure they get their work done, time to play outside because they’ll get tired of being cooped up, more time to actually cook because I won’t be commuting, and six cases of toilet paper because… oh, wait. Never do we ever need six cases of toilet paper at once. You won’t find us locked in a bunker, chewing our fingernails until someone swoops in and tells us it’s safe to come out. As a friend pointed out recently, there are many people who are immunocompromised, and they’ve learned how to live in a world that’s not exactly immuno-friendly. I think we can all take a lesson from them. Wash your hands, folks, and have a little common sense.

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Traffic Jam at the Intersection of Chronic Sinus Infection Avenue and Swamped Street

traffic jam

Hello, my name is Sarah, and I am a planner. You might call me OCD. My husband rarely makes plans without asking me first, for fear that I’ll lose it if my plan gets sidetracked. This particular piece of the Sarah puzzle doesn’t always fit nicely with the rest of the pieces. But on the up side, I’ve always known what I wanted. As a seventeen-year-old high school graduate, there was absolutely no question about what major I would claim in college: English, obviously, because I love to read and write, and I was well on my way to becoming a published author who would make enough income to support herself and her future family.

Fast forward to reality: at almost thirty-five, the only books I’ve published were paid for by me, and the income I’ve made as a writer is hardly steady, much less supportive to the family budget. I still love to write, but it was with a heavy dose of humility that I finally admitted that, if I didn’t want to watch my husband work himself to death from the sidelines, I needed to find something profitable to do. Having a traditional, full-time job was never a part of my plan. But after I stalled for years and accepted it, I have found satisfaction and even a joy I never expected by first teaching and now crunching numbers, of all things.

Have no fear: I am still a writer, and even though I am much less active than I once was, this blog keeps me accountable. Although I’m going on three months without a post, it’s not that I’ve lost my passion for writing or run out of things to say; I simply haven’t been able to wrap my mind around a cohesive topic in a while. Or more accurately, I haven’t had the time to so much as think about it. What with going from the “let’s look at houses” to actually buying one and moving in in exactly one month, being busier than ever at work, getting and staying sick for almost three months running, and becoming an independent consultant with Thirty-One Gifts, I feel lucky to remember my name.

But it happens to be spring break, and I consider it a God-thing that inspiration finally struck right when I had the time to nurture it. It happened Monday while reading my daily devotional. Some mornings, I absorb it, while others I’m lucky to remember what I read five minutes later. But this particular entry seemed to be speaking to me:

Lately, as I’ve been skimming financial advice books, I’ve noticed an interesting trend. While almost all such books have good advice, many imply that the primary reason to cut costs is to live like millionaires later. But one book offered a refreshingly different perspective, arguing that living simply is essential for a rich life. If you need more or fancier stuff to feel joy, the book suggested, “You’re missing the point of being alive.”

—Monica Brands, “The Point of Being Alive,” Our Daily Bread (read full entry here)

This struck me because I’ve been following one particular financial method for over a decade, and it is absolutely based on the idea of sacrificing certain pleasures now in order to enjoy them after retirement. Now, I have no argument with saving for the future. And really, is being fiscally responsible and living within my means a bad thing? But I don’t think that’s what the author of the devotional was getting at. There has to be a balance between wasting what we earn on instant gratification and becoming misers who save for a tomorrow that might never come.

Years ago, I met a woman who had looked forward to her husband’s retirement more than anything else in her life. They were retirement saving pros, their goal to travel during their golden years. But mere weeks after he retired, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and their retirement dream died right along with him.

I am usually not one of these people who dwells on death, but I have been sick for 11 weeks now—the perfect storm of chronic sinus infections, allergies, and barely enough time to rest every night. The same day I read the above devotional, I had a CT scan to ascertain what, exactly, is going on in my head. My ENT expects to find a reason behind the congestion, but as soon as he said, “scan of your head,” I thought about my friend who lost her life to a brain tumor at 32.

Wouldn’t it be just like Life to give me a major detour? Health problems are a nightmare to planners like me—I don’t have room for that nonsense! But while I seriously doubt that my results will show anything that serious, just the idea of it has been enough to make me look back over my life and consider my regrets. Well, I’m not a bestselling author… and that’s about it. I married the love of my life, and we have two children whom we adore. My family in itself is blessing enough, but I have more: we’ve taken great trips and made lots of memories. We read to our children all the time and tell them stories of our own childhoods. We instill in them the values that we hold dear, and I hope I’m not too boastful in saying that they’re good-hearted people (even if the older one is snarky and the younger one is a hot mess).

When I was younger, I assumed that everything I wanted in life would fall into place as easily as my marriage: I would land a literary agent, get published, play Scrooge McDuck in my mountains of earnings, and then write more novels from my office while watching my children play in my perfectly manicured backyard. I have the husband and children, so why is the rest so unattainable? It’s frustrating to say that I’m a writer—that I’ve written novels—yet have little to show for it. I was jarred by my ungratefulness when a friend who is successful in her career and seems to have it all told me she admires me for being a mother. She doesn’t look down on me at all because the career I’ve always desired remains out of reach.

It’s easy to get lost in the belief that life doesn’t begin until [fill in the blank]. The problem is that if we have to achieve x before life is worth living, we could travel down that lonely road forever without reaching the destination.

While the lure of a perfect someday can blind us to the imperfect joys of today, if we follow the (annoying, frustrating, life-changing) detours without fighting to stay on our original path, we’ll likely end up right where we need to be… with many (worthwhile, unexpected, fulfilling) stops along the way.