To Plan or Not to Plan? That is the Question! Tea with a Druid 54

Welcome to this 54th session of Tea with a Druid. I can hardly believe we’ve had so many cups of tea together!
As we move towards the closing of the year and the anticipation of the birth of a new one, I’d like to explore this question with you: to plan or not to plan?
Are you planner or a pantser? This is a term used by writing teachers: there are people who plan what they are going to write – sometimes creating very detailed outlines before they start actually penning their novel or book – and there are people who ‘fly by the seat of their pants’, who start writing without necessarily knowing where they are going. There are advantages to both methods. There are also risks. If you over-plan you risk closing yourself to inspiration further down the track. If you fly by your pants you can take all sorts of false turns and can sometimes crash-land. It’s very painful – I’ve done it!
Of course there are all sorts of variations on this – where you semi-plan but leave room for spontaneous changes of direction and so on, but the bottom line is you either have planned where you are going or you are trusting in something to get you there: luck, the story, the gods, Awen.

As we come up to the New Year this offers an obvious opportunity for planning – hence the whole idea of ‘New Year’s resolutions’. We have a holiday period in which we can give ourselves time to reflect and orient ourselves. Stephanie and I developed a quite comprehensive way of doing this, which I have described in this post: ‘Creating the Life You Want to Lead’. It served us very well for 25 years, but at the beginning of this year we tried an experiment. We just didn’t plan beyond the bare minimum needed for life to function.

What happened in 2018? Tea with a Druid started (it wasn’t planned!) and here we are at session 54. I created the Lessons in Magic training which is going so well with a fantastic bunch of people. And then in October I was invited to write a book on Sophrology, which will come out in August next year.
To plan or not to plan? Both ways can work. Have a wonderful New Year – whether or not you choose to plan it!