Safari imepasua

The old joke is that, if you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans for the future. 
A few years ago, I attended a high school reunion. One of my classmates asked what I'd done for work.
"High tech," I replied.
"I could have predicted that," she said.
I stopped for a moment. "I didn't," I finally mumbled.
At no time up until the time that I started working with computers, now north of 30 years ago, would I have predicted that I would have worked with computers, let alone enjoy the work. I'd had lots of very good ideas about what my life's work should be. I think that I'm glad that I got it wrong because what eventually happened was pretty good indeed.
In the New York Times Magazine piece last year, Without a Prayer, Maggie Robbins offered the Swahili phrase safari imepasua: "the journey, it has blown apart." Readers of this journal, now at its 2000^th post, have seen lots of examples of very good plans that have been overcome by events. Our family has seen this happen several times in just the past few weeks. A sudden death, an unexpected turn of an illness, and all that.
Each of these twists makes us smarter, I guess. Not smarter in the way that will help us predict what we should do next. We'll make our predictions and then see what events (God?) will have to say about it.
No, the smarts that we get seem to be more about acceptance, seeing what's in front of us rather than letting what we wish for overpower our sight.
Next week, we have some meetings that will set in motion some plans for the fall. The meetings relate to care for others in our family, young and old, and care for ourselves, about work and school and home and a bunch of other stuff.
We could pray, if we had a mind to pray, that our plans will be fulfilled in the way that we expect. We'd be praying, in that sense, as a child brings a list to Santa Claus. Instead, we might do better to pray as Maggie Robbins found out. Nifundishe, she said, Swahili for "teach me."