Plan B

New seasons have a way of chewing up and spitting out normal schedules.

Naively, you think, “This afternoon, I will . . .” Likely as not, you won’t. While you’re trying to carry on as usual, do not marvel if something wholly unknown to last season’s routine interrupts your plans.

To navigate new seasons, expect interruptions; refuse diversions.

Today, my plans went awry early. Expecting to spend the day working in my home office, I donned a warm-up suit and headed upstairs. Immediately, my e-mail presented opportunities I hadn’t anticipated. This should have delighted me. Instead, it stressed me. Deciding which opportunities to pursue took time. Acting on what I decided took even longer.

Then, a project I’d anticipated completing in an hour took two. Near noon, I still hadn’t started the main task planned for the day. The phone rang. A caller from a government office told me she had received certain business paperwork I’d sent. I had correctly filled out one form – but had failed to include a second required form.

Before mailing the paperwork, I’d called a financial advisor and the government office itself to confirm what to send. Neither had mentioned a second form. The caller invited me to drive to her office to complete the paperwork. When the government invites, I generally accept.

As I changed out of warm-ups, my husband popped in. Discovering my new afternoon plan, he asked me to handle another business matter at a second government office. Innocently, he thought the two offices could be found in the same building. No. The offices are located in two different towns, neither of them the town where we live. However, I accepted the second errand, knowing that town lay en route to the other.

Thus, I spent the afternoon making a 90-mile round trip, enhanced by various trip-lengthening experiences:

• I missed an exit and went six miles out of my way.
• A phone call introduced a third matter I had to stop and handle.
• Lowered signal arms at a railroad crossing halted traffic on one town's main street for roughly 10 minutes. Why the arms lowered, I know not. We saw no train.

Even before the phone call that sent me cross country, I was fuming over the interruptions diverting me from my original plan for the day.

Ah, but somewhere between the missed exit and the railroad crossing, I realized: By accepting interruptions, I had sidestepped diversions. I could have refused “distractions” and continued with my intended schedule.

Plan A felt comfortable and familiar. Plan B felt arduous and tedious. But the interruptions did not take me around the mulberry bush. Each project, each errand, took me forward into new territory. The normal routine created the diversion that could have kept me from the best.

Long ago, a woman named Deborah sang a victory song because her people let a major interruption shatter their schedules. Abandoning their routines, they followed Deborah and a man named Barak into battle. Embracing the arduous, they saw miracles, won freedom from oppression and entered a 40-year season of peace.

Yet a tribe called the Reubenites missed out on the victory. Judges 5:16, The Message, laments, “Diverted and distracted, Reuben's divisions couldn't make up their minds.”

Some interruptions side-track us; those, we need to sidestep. But many times we let the routine divert and distract us from the tedious, arduous business of pressing forward into the new. Waiting at a railroad crossing, I made up my mind: Expect interruptions; refuse diversions.

© 2008, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.