Savor the Ride

A woman builds a schedule precise enough to run a small airport, every hour accounted for, every contingency mapped against, color coded down to the fifteen minute block. For a while it holds. Then her mother’s test results come back wrong on a Tuesday, or the job restructures on a Friday with no warning, or a child needs something no calendar block was ever built to contain, and the whole structure comes down in a single afternoon, and she stands in the middle of it holding a planner that no longer means anything, asking how something built this carefully could fail this completely.

It failed because nothing in it was built to bend. She had confused tightness for balance, the way plenty of people do, believing that if the grid was fine enough, controlled enough, life would finally run out of new ways to knock it over. Life does not run out of ways. It keeps arriving on its own schedule, and any structure built entirely out of control eventually meets a week that control cannot survive.

A tree that will not bend in a storm does not survive that storm because it is strong. It survives because the wind happened to stay under a number nobody wrote down anywhere, and the next storm does not check that number before it arrives. The trees still standing after the worst nights are almost never the stiffest ones in the grove. They are the ones whose trunks were already moving before the wind ever picked up, the ones you could watch sway a foot in either direction and come back to center every single time.

I built something rigid enough to feel safe once, and then watched a year take it apart piece by piece, a phone call at a time, until I stopped calling the dismantling a failure of my planning and started calling it what it actually was, which was the planning’s mistake for ever assuming stillness could be the goal.

Savor the ride would have sounded soft to me once, something painted on a coffee mug, too passive for a man building a life on purpose. I hold the wheel differently now. I have both hands on it exactly where they belong, and I have also stopped expecting the road itself to hold still under the tires, the potholes I did not put there, weather that has its own plans regardless of mine.

I ask two questions most weeks now, out loud, alone, before Monday starts. Where was my energy misaligned this week. What needs to shift for the week ahead. Not what needs adding. Shifting, because a question about shifting assumes the frame itself is allowed to move, and a question about adding assumes it is not.

The woman with the airport schedule will build another one after this one fails, tighter this time, hoping the next version holds where the last one cracked. A frame with no give in it splits the first time the house settles, and every house settles. The frames still standing decades later were built already knowing they would have to move, hung a little loose on purpose, so the door still closes even after the whole structure has shifted an inch to the left.