Best Laid Plans

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.

Rumi

I had it all perfectly planned. My husband was taking our 12 month old to visit family in Derbyshire and I was staying in London. Three days all to myself. My first stretch of time alone in a year. I couldn’t wait!

The first day went as intended, at a day spa, floating between the sauna, the hammam and the chill out area. That evening, I lay in bed totally blissed out and looking forward to a long night of uninterrupted sleep. Suddenly, I heard a strange noise coming from my son’s room. I discovered water, dripping in through the base of the cill and spattering on the floor. It wasn’t a huge amount, so I put down some plastic sheeting and went to sleep.

At 2am, I was woken by a loud banging sound. I jumped out of bed. Water was now dripping ferociously through a recessed light fitting. It had already soaked my son’s mattress, and was pooling on the wood floor. I raced round the flat searching for buckets, old towels. I barely slept the rest of the night. By dawn, the water was filling bucket after bucket.

I was furious, and shattered. This was supposed to be MY day. How dare this happen and mess up my plans. I was meant to be going to my favourite yoga class, the one I can’t usually make, then out for lunch. Instead, I was forced to stay close to home, to empty out buckets and be on standby for a plumber, who was coming at some unspecified time that morning.

I stomped round the flat for a bit. But while once I’d have stayed stuck in the rage - and quite possibly let its flavour determine my entire day - I was relatively quickly able to plug into the place within me that lay beyond it. I knew had a choice: either to salvage something from this tired, broken messy day, or not. And life has taught me that a day is a precious thing and not to squandered.

The architect in me loves to plan, be it a space, a yoga class, or a day. But often enough, things don’t go to plan. Then what? Do we stay stuck in the narrow and frustrated bandwidth of this is what I wanted and I haven’t got it. Or can we relax our grip and widen our perspective of what is beautiful, rich or meaningful?

That Friday, I had to find beauty in unexpected ways. This included sitting in meditation and allowing for the sound of dripping water to be a part of my practice, and to try and respond to it as simply another expression of life, rather than an irritant that had ruined my day. During the time the buckets took to fill, I popped out to a new local café I’d been wanting to try for a while where I drank lots of good coffee and ate pain au chocolat while brainstorming ideas for articles I could write to promote my soon to be released book. In my sleep-deprived state, I think I may have come up with some half decent ones, as you sometimes do when you switch off from your rational brain! Walking home from the café, I glanced up at the dull January sky and discovered a stark beauty of its pewter tones, its gunmetal clouds. I spent the rest of the day at home, and even though this wasn’t as exciting as going out, it was grounding. My mum popped over with an extra bucket, so I got to spend some time alone with her, which I rarely do these days. And in the late afternoon, by which time the leak had stopped, I did a beautiful candlelit yoga practice.

This is of course a relatively small scale example of something not going to plan. But it was a valuable lesson in the importance of being adaptable, in finding something good in a situation that we haven’t chosen, rather than just letting our reactivity lead the way, as can be all too easy to do.

For sure, I’ll continue to have desires and preferences and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’ll always choose a great yoga class over waiting two hours at the hospital for an appointment, or a good night’s sleep over being woken repeatedly by a crying baby. But perhaps the deepest learning from this experience was that the more I’m able to be truly present with what is unfolding, the more adept I become at sliding beyond my personal likes and dislikes. I’m able to recognise that it’s all life, expressing herself in her myriad of forms. And that, in a strange way, there’s a beauty to all of it, even the harsher things - if only because they remind us of our own aliveness, of our tender beating hearts.

And, finally, were it not for the leak, I wouldn’t have written this letter, which I always love to do!