Back Up Plans and the Lack of Them

This has been a week of looking back to the past.  Last year, I didn't know it, but it was the last week of so much normal, the old normal for me:   the last hair cut in a salon, the last time I would see fully stocked stores, the last time of preparing for travel by plane.  Our grocery stores still have a section here and there that's wiped out, and it no longer seems strange to me.  I expect to travel on a plane again, but I may wear a mask, even when a new pandemic isn't raging across the planet--there will always be contagions on the move.

This has also been a week where I feel like I've fallen through a hole in time.  My hair is long, the way it was in high school and college.  I'm doing various pieces of paperwork as I apply to go to school.  Am I seventeen years old?  I even have a zit on my chin.

Yesterday I had a phone conversation with an Art Institute friend; we haven't had a conversation in over a month.  I told her about my plan to go to seminary, the way I would go slow if I still had my job, the way my plan might change if my job disappears.

She said, "What's your back up plan?"

I said, "That is the back up plan."

I spent the rest of the day returning to that interchange.  In a way, my approach here is a change for me.  I've always said that I'm the person who has a plan, a back up plan, and several other back up plans in case the first one didn't work--and then a satellite plan and then the plan I keep in deep reserve, in case the apocalypse comes.

She did finish the conversation by saying, "I wish my 28 year old son had your kind of passion."  He's been living in her home almost a year with no job and no plan for the future--he, too, must feel like he's fallen through a hole in time.

I need to think about the times I've moved toward a vision for the future with certainty and the times when I've had lots of back up plans.  I wonder if the lack of back up plans means I've come up with a good plan--or am I being blind to some aspect?