Unexpected
When it comes to vacations, I am a planner.
My family knows this about me. “Hey, I wonder if we could…” is code for, “Eric, can you please see if this thing we want to do is feasible, and if so make it happen?” My browsing history is full of travel routes, flight checks, lodging options, and so forth for a few trips we’ve taken and dozens we might never get to. I have not yet, for example, driven from our current home in South Dakota to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, but I know the route we would take, where we could stay, and some of the hidden gems along the route.
Not that I mind. I enjoy planning. Personality tests, both scientific and otherwise, routinely tell me that I am a strategic thinker who is good at identifying likely permutations and responding appropriately. So I’m good at it, and like most people I have fun doing things I do well. Plus, with the near-impossible schedules that families in our stage of life keep, the pressure is on for our occasional vacations, made precious by their scarcity, to go well.
So when we left on a baseball vacation just before school started, we were just putting a plan in motion. Jonathan, who hates sports and at any rate had band camp, stayed behind. Zachary and Denise and I took off for Kansas City knowing more or less what we would do. Three nights in a reasonably priced Air BnB. Royals-Dodgers on Saturday and Sunday. Negro Leagues and Jazz Museum on Monday. Off to St. Louis on Tuesday for Cardinals-Rockies, a play day on Wednesday, and another game that night. Thursday we would leave around 8:00am to get back to Mitchell at a decent hour, knowing that we would be moving in new freshmen to the DWU dorms the next morning at 9:00am.
It was a good plan, if I do say so myself. We did every one of those things. But if I told you how flawlessly our vacation went, you’d be bored to tears. Because if everything goes according to plan, the story isn’t interesting. Not at all.
Imagine a novel in which the hero recovered the jewel without having to throw a punch. Or a movie in which lovers never have a fight and get married with the full support of their family and friends. Blecchh! We need difficulty and setbacks and surprises to drive the plot forward. How else will we know what the hero is made of? The plan has to fail in order for the story to succeed.
Which makes me wonder why so many of us fear the unexpected.
Outside of the occasional birthday party, most of us have a fairly negative view of actual surprises. Try completing the following fill-in-the-blank
An unexpected ___________-
What did you come up with? My list included things like diagnosis, pregnancy, job loss, journey, death, and windfall. Not an entirely negative list, by any means. But each one of these words implies a major change, which in turn implies major stress. The unexpected alters our plans, if it doesn’t wreck them altogether. It forces us into spaces we did not choose and can even upend our understanding of the universe (as in I.I. Rabi’s famous, “Who ordered that?” response to the discovery of the muon). Most of us fear change, to varying degrees, and we will do our level best to retain the familiar, even at the expense of the potentially better.
Believe me, I understand. Planners hate learning how fragile their plans are, how easily they can get shredded by a dead phone battery or a road closure or a lost reservation. We’d rather think we are in control, and that we’ll stay that way.
If we want a good story, though, we can’t stick to the script. We have to find our way through obstacles. We have to overcome odds. We have to take the opportunities that present themselves to us. We have to improvise.
Thankfully, our latest vacation didn’t involve any viruses or vehicle malfunctions. But we did encounter two unexpected opportunities.
The first came at the jazz museum. While Zachary stared in awe at the saxophone Charlie Parker played at the Massey Hall Concert in 1953 (yes, he is that kind of nerd), one of the attendants told me about the Monday concerts they had in the little club at the front of the museum. He invited Zachary to bring his trumpet and sit in with the band, which he did—this high school kid from 500 miles away, improvising solos on the fly with musicians who didn’t even know each other’s names. It was one of coolest venues he’d ever been played, made possible because we happened to be there on a Monday. The universe gave us an unexpected gift. All we did was receive it. But we did that.
We had one more improvisation left. On the last day of our trip, the Cardinals unexpectedly announced that Adam Wainwright, the 40-year-old pitcher who has been with the club almost as long as Zachary has been alive, would start the Thursday game. Staying to watch would mean driving most of the night to get back to Mitchell, not to mention starting the semester with a hellacious sleep debt to pay off. It made a lot more sense to stick to the plan and go back home like responsible adults.
We stayed, of course. And Zachary got to see his heroes do amazing things—home runs from Albert Pujols and Paul Goldschmidt, diving plays by Nolan Arenado and Lars Nootbaar, a defensive gem by Yadier Molina, seven scoreless innings by Wainwright. Even if we’d had the power to plan for it, we couldn’t have drawn it up any better than that.
We arrived back in Mitchell around 2:30am the next morning. After a few hours’ sleep, we crawled out of bed and went to work, filled with the reminder that, however many unwelcome surprises the universe may throw our way, there are times when the unexpected leads us to places of near transcendence. It was as happy as I’d been in a long time.
