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martin, jen and john



Who needs a plan when you've got options.  -Jennifer Aniston

That just may be one of the greatest things ever said by an individual, if you ask me. Forget the plan! Pick and chose as you go. Picking and choosing implies an ability to establish and even pin point opportunities. You can create opportunities or 'options' by leaving your expectations at the curb. Expectations are like empty boxes sheathed in pretty wrapping paper. It's not so much a gift if you think about it, but more so a let down. Expectations are assumptions disguised as high hopes that ultimately mislead us. We look forward to the future, and that's great! But we do it with a game plan in mind - a scenario if you will. We might even call it a dream, or our truth, if you're the "out there" spiritual-digger type. That can translate to anyone. Spirituality is a mind set, not a religion. It's a lot of things, but I'm getting off subject.

Now back to the whole plan thing.

Our scenario, also known as our dream, or our truth, or our "way" is often of grave substance to our mind. It may even be very meaningful to us. It might be everything to us because our plan smells like fish frying. It taste like productivity, if productivity had a taste. It looks like irons in the fire. We're hot. We're busy. Our big sign reads "Occupied".  But of what value or use is our plan when we start boiling things down to the heart?

Does it take a plan to be happy? Does it take a plan to make a dream come true?

Let me start by asking another question. What is a dream when we're not asleep? And what the hell is a dream when we are asleep?? When I'm usurped by the witching hours - my body still, eyes are closed - I become a slave to the mystical me. My subconscious mind catapults me into a vatic world of prophecy, delusion, and psychotic abstractions. Sometimes I can't wake myself up from the far fetched dream world. I'm hog-tied to my sleep while I fly and panic because my teeth are falling out. My car breaks don't work. Someone died. I'm in a house that I grew up in...It's weird. To dream is to misplace myself in a garden variety of subconscious junk where I'm bounded to apparitions of wayward love and premonitions that are akin to my soul - somehow, someway. Then I replace myself and I dream a happier dream, and then I awaken to a new day and it starts all over again.

It's an escape. It's a forewarning. Dreams are messages when perceived more intently and when understood. But I don't understand, no...not completely. And what does all this dream talk have to do with a plan anyway?

Martin Luther King Jr. understood a thing or two, and I'm sure he had a plan or two. He definitely had a dream. He said it himself. "I have a dream." And he was a man with the fortitude to endure, firstly, a nightmare. Hatred came knocking on his visionary door. A racist refute pervaded and invaded, but he kept dreaming! And he awoke from the torment kicking and screaming. He kicked and hollered until he created a movement. Several movements prevailed actually, including Woman's Rights, as black woman begin engaging in the feminist movement. Things started to change for the better. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream, and then he was murdered. RIP.

But, that wasn't his plan.

No one plans on being shot and killed. It may have been a tentative worry in his mind, or in anyone's mind whom may choose to tread the sterling path of revolutionary leadership, but it's never the plan. Martin Luther King Jr's plan was to combat racial inequality through nonviolence. He spoke for the people, by the people, and he made a stand...because he had a dream. I'm getting redundant. But it's the good kind of repetition. ;)

He had a dream. He had a dream. He had a dream. He had a dream. But is a dreamplan?

Maybe it's simply an option. And who needs a plan when you've got options?

Because if it's true, if we do actually have the power and the voice to chose our destiny and to live the life we dream about, then maybe our dream is just one of many destinies. We pick and chose as we go, right? And we live and learn. The dream is modified, it shifts. It changes and it distorts. And so do we. Maybe our "dream" is just an option that works, for now. A passionate one, yes. But passion doesn't require a plan.

So maybe our plan is just one of many let downs. It's that "gift" in that empty, but pretty gift wrapped box. It's a second thought. It's a thousand thoughts. It's a revision. A new course. Maybe The Plan is really just an opportunity to reconsider...our options.

Then we can dream!

"'Cause life is what happens while you're busy making other plans."  -John Lennon

"And you may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."  -John Lennon


Love & Peace,
AM


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