I’m now on the 9th day of my very own self-imposed 30-day blog post challenge which also propelled me to restart doing other things I love and one of them is reading books. An iBook copy of a fantasy adventure story entitled TWO SPELLS was sent to me by an author named Mark Morrison from the U.S. and I can’t wait to start reading it. I wasn’t expecting to be staying at the farm for a week now so I didn’t bring the current books I am reading (I also didn’t bring more clothes and underwear, lol!) This is what happens when I don’t make options and just basically try to stick to my plan which I keep forgetting usually don’t really happen in real life! Life is full of surprises and events that we don’t really get to plan but happen anyway. Like this kind author who out of the blue gave me something nice to read. I’ll do that as soon as I’m done with my blogging tasks and other online work for today. And when I finish the book, I’ll tell you all about it here. Coz I’m a bookworm too, in case you didn’t know.

For today’s blog post, I’d like to talk about making options. It was Jennifer Aniston who said that she doesn’t make plans. She makes options.  And I say to Jen, good for you! I should have done that a long time ago too!

I like making plans. I like listing down things, scheduling stuff to do, and making things happen according to how I envisioned things to be. Making lists is good because it gives you focus and determination to finish or do what you have listed. Perhaps it’s the traveler in me coupled with my OC (obsessive-compulsive) tendency… I like to know where I’m going and when to go to where I’m going. I am this way because I like to prepare  myself for what’s to come.

It used to be my plan to just beach bum forever…

I thought I’ll be donning my bikinis until my old age (hahaha!)

I thought I’ll always be carefree…

But you know what, life is so unpredictable. Things that you didn’t expect, not even in your wildest dreams nor your scariest nightmares do happen and when they do, you’re left emotionally and mentally paralyzed. You can’t think straight, you can’t breathe, you experience panic attacks like never before…  In short, your world comes tumbling down and you have no clue what to do next.

I felt all of that when I got “divorced”. And I felt it all again when I got pregnant and became a mom… coz I swore to myself when I was just a little kid that I will never ever want to have a kid of my own (again, never say never! hahaha!) 

Aside from heartbreaks and unplanned motherhood, there are so many things in life that happen that we never really think will happen but they do. And most of the time, we are left baffled, unprepared and worse, an emotional wreck afterward.

In order to avoid this kind of scenario from happening (again), it is best to make options. If this was money we’re talking about, I’d say, don’t put your eggs in one basket. Invest in stocks, mutual funds, time deposits, businesses, etc. Make the most of your funds and lessen the risk of losses. Do the same thing with the things that we want to happen in our lives. Don’t just make one plan. Make lots of it! Go ahead and make plans (if you’re the planner kind of person like I am) but make sure you have plenty of options to choose from so should your Plan A fail to work or come to fruition, you still have Plan B, Plan C and so on and so forth to do next. It’s like going into battle I guess. We make sure that we have a lot of ammunition to choose from to fight the different kinds of enemies we meet along the way.

We applied that in our farming adventure. Although we hoped that by this time, the mushroom farm will be full of 10,000 thriving fruiting bags, we also thought of doing vegetable farming should things not go exactly as we planned. So when our first caretakers left us, we somehow found a way to continue our farming and agribiz activities. And like the proverbial saying “put your eggs in more than one basket”, we also have our stocks, my online work, insurances, mutual funds, savings and other business plans in the works.

So have you done this lately? Have you made plans for something big only to realize that it’s never going to happen? Isn’t it better to have options instead?

Til my next post! ^_^