How do I live when nothing goes to plan?

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

A plan is a wager made with a sea you do not own. I sailed once toward Corsica under no plan of mine, and I learned more in those eight years than in all my planned ones. Make the plan, but hold it as a traveller holds an itinerary: with a clause already written in, "unless something prevents it." The wise man's great advantage is not that things go right for him, but that nothing surprises him. So live by the day, not the scheme. A day is a whole life in small, and it can be finished well even when the year has gone to pieces. Tonight, write down what you expected of tomorrow, then beside it, what you would do if it failed.

Friedrich Nietzsche

A plan is a wish that has hired a lawyer. You drew up a contract with the future, and now you are outraged that the other party never signed. Look at what you are really mourning. Not the plan, but the proof it would have given you: that the world answers to you. It does not. Good. I wrote my best pages in rented rooms in Sils-Maria, with a head that split and eyes that failed, none of it on my schedule. The illness cancelled my professorship and handed me my work. So hold your plans like a walking stick, not a map. Then ask of each ruin: what can this be made into?

Marcus Aurelius

Plans were never yours. Only the intention was, and the way you meet what comes. I planned a philosopher's life. I got the purple, a plague, and the Danube. My co-emperor died. Cassius rose against me. My son was not what Rome needed. None of it was in the plan, and each of it became the work. So write it down each night: I intended this; it went otherwise; what does the new thing ask of me? Justice, patience, a clear head. Those can always be done. The obstacle is the road. Walk it. Tomorrow, before the first plan, hold one rule: whatever happens, I will act well in it. That plan cannot be broken.

Søren Kierkegaard

A plan is a letter written to a future that has not agreed to read it. I wrote many, and the most carefully drafted one was my engagement to Regine. It came apart in my own hands, and by my own doing. I learned something there, though slowly: the wreck of a plan shows what you were actually serving. Some people loved the plan itself, and when it falls they fall with it. Others find that beneath it lay a single thing they willed, and that this thing can still be willed in a ruin. So the either/or is this: do you mourn the plan, or the self that hoped to be safe inside it? Each costs you something, and the second costs more.

Michel de Montaigne

Look at how my own life went. I retired to my tower at thirty-eight to rest among my books until death, and within a few years I was mayor of Bordeaux, riding about with plague in the villages and soldiers at my gate. Nothing I planned came out as planned, except perhaps the book, which I never planned at all. What I learned is modest. A plan is a guess I make about weather I cannot see. So I hold it as I hold my horse's rein, loosely, ready to be carried somewhere else. And the detour often has the better wine. I do not say you should; I say it has happened to me, and I am still alive and mostly content.

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