What If Things Not Going To Plan Is Actually The Plan?

My mum used to say to me, “Paula, you want everything done yesterday.”

Those words have been echoing in my head lately. I have been increasingly aware of delays and diversions and it made me reflect. I’ve always had a fairly strong impatience gene. My mum saw it and named it when I was a very little girl. 

I really struggle to access patience sometimes. I can find myself feeling irritated if held up in traffic. I get fed up if I have to wait for buses and trains. In fact, I always leave things to the last minute to avoid having to wait. My particular 'favourite' irritation is being put on hold, waiting for solutions to problems that, in my mind, ought to have been sorted out by now.

When something is delayed, held up, lost, postponed or stuck in somebody else’s system, it’s very easy to experience that delay as a problem in itself.

I’ve had quite a run of them of late. Replacement windows that should have taken three days took three months. There have been admin problems, misplaced documents, delays sorting out life insurance, delays in receiving test results, false starts, slow growth, cancelled appointments.

Everywhere I turn, something seems to be saying, “Not yet." and it's annoyingly provocative. It triggers frustration, irritation, overthinking and that familiar internal refrain: Ugh, why is this taking so long?

Have you ever known impatience to speed things up? In my experience it doesn’t make anything happen faster. Perhaps that’s why “a watched pot never boils” has endured as an expression. A watched pot does, of course, boil at the same speed whether you stare at it or not. But attention magnifies the experience of waiting. It changes the way we experience the wait. Think about that. The thing will take the time that it takes. The attention we give it dictates how we experience the thing. 

There is some interesting research around this. In ADHD research, for example, there is a recognised concept called delay aversion. Some people appear to experience waiting and delayed reward as more uncomfortable than others. That doesn’t mean everyone with ADHD is impatient, or that impatience is purely neurological. But it does suggest that our relationship with waiting is not always simply a matter of being “good” or “bad” at patience.

That matters because it changes the question. Instead of, Why am I like this? We can ask, What have I learned to do when things don’t happen quickly enough for me? Then an even more useful question: Does this response still serve me?

I believe that I live in a friendly universe. For me, that means believing that life is not always conspiring against us when things don’t go to plan. Sometimes the very thing we would rather avoid can become the thing that develops us. You don’t build courage by never feeling afraid. You don’t build self-trust by always knowing exactly what to do. You don’t build resilience by having everything go smoothly.

In the same way, you don’t build patience by having everything happen exactly when or how you want it to. What if the delays were not interruptions to the lesson. What if they were the lesson.

That was the penny-drop moment for me this week. If patience is something I need more of, how else would I develop it except by being given opportunities to practise it?

The same could be true of many of the patterns we carry.

“I’m impatient.”

“I’m an overthinker.”

“I don’t cope well with uncertainty.”

“I need things sorted.”

“I’ve always been like this.”

Those statements can start to sound like identity. But there is a difference between understanding a pattern and accepting it as permanent. Something can have been true for a long time without having to be true forever.

So I get curious. What if the thing we call “just who I am” is nothing more than a response we have practised many times? If one response can be practised, can a more helpful response be practised instead?

Maybe things not going to plan is actually part of The Plan.

When we ask ourselves, “What is this here to teach me?”, we can alchemise frustration into possibility.

We don't need to become endlessly serene, pretending frustration isn’t real, smiling beatifically at the world while sitting in a two-hour traffic jam. We can recognise that we may not be able to control how quickly life moves, but we can change the amount of power the delay has over us. That, for me, is where the possibility lies. Not in getting life to behave differently but in becoming someone who can handle it differently.

Making It Intentional

This week, if something in your life is not unfolding as quickly or as easily as you had hoped, perhaps it is worth asking:

What if this isn’t getting in the way of where I’m going?

What if this is developing something I’m going to need when I get there?

Your Next Step

I'm really curious to know what happens for you when you practice these questions and shift the energy around your response.  I'd love to hear from you if you notice anything opening up or becoming unblocked for you. Hit reply - I read every comment.