Man plans and God laughs.  If this is true then I must be a constant source of knee-slapping, pants-wetting humor.  I wouldn’t call myself compulsively organized, but then again some of my friends might which would indicate that I’m simply in denial.  Perhaps I am…but it’s not enough of a concern to force me to mend my ways.

It’s a survival mechanism.  Life’s a gamble and in order to win occasionally or break even in most cases, it’s the easiest way to hedge your bets.  Everyone does it to a certain extent, but most stop at the first or second possible scenarios to their actions.  I don’t.  I’m never satisfied until I believe I have covered every possible eventuality that my vivid imagination can concoct.

Evidently I’d missed one as far as my relationship with Danny was concerned.  The result was catastrophic. 

I’m sure that some of you have been in similar situations and I’ll barely have to explain for you to understand what that felt like.  For the rest…I’ll try to convey the magnitude of the fallout. 

We all wake up every day with expectations of how that day will go.  I won’t go into what that might consist of since you know your own routine better than I.  It might stray slightly from the ingrained path…perhaps you forget your coffee on the kitchen counter as you are leaving, maybe the school calls because your child is ill and you’ll need to pick them up.  It might be a fender bender on the road or heavy traffic from somebody else’s fender bender that causes you to arrive later than you would like to your destination.  Sure…they are irritating to a degree, but in the long run they can be managed and it doesn’t affect the basic direction that you have chosen to lead your life.

But occasionally there comes along an event that causes us to stand in mute horror, our hands poised unconsciously over our own mouths because the magnitude of it is simply unspeakable.  While not directly involved, the response to such disaster is unanimous and off the top of my head I can think of two events in my own lifetime that caused such a response:  September 11^th, 2001 and the tsunami that resulted from the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.  Hurricane Katrina would probably rank up there as well.

Total devastation…which makes the fender bender suddenly ridiculous in comparison, doesn’t it?  The only difference between what I was experiencing and what the victims of these catastrophes had experienced were the number of casualties.  The scale was smaller, but the devastation was no less than total.

One morning I woke up and the world was what it always was…and then in a split second, an unforeseen event occurred that ripped away the very fabric of that world so that it would never exist again in that shape or form.  It was gone…just gone.  Poof.  Every dream, every plan…just gone as if it had never been.

You’ve seen pictures of survivors, haven’t you?  Whether it’s war, terrorism or natural disaster…they all look the same.  They wander about with a look of total disbelief, unable to comprehend that their lives have been altered irreparably.  Their eyes stare without seeing because it just doesn’t make sense.  It’s too damn big.  They were prepared for forgotten coffee…not a giant wall of water lifting up from the placid beauty of the ocean to flush them from the face of the earth.

Man plans…God laughs.  It makes me wonder though what kind of sense of humor it takes to laugh like that.  People plan because they have dreams.  I’ve never found humor in the failure of dreams to materialize…not my own and certainly not others.  It seems rather cruel.

But then again…I’m not religious.  I chalked it up to bad planning on my part. 

In a way, people are like ants.  Have you ever played god to an ant hill?  For no reason at all except maybe the bus is late and you’re bored while waiting, the cones of sand majestically rising from between the cracks in the sidewalk seem worthy of your attention.  They’re ants…who cares?  With the toe of your shoe you nudge the first delicate structure into oblivion, gratified as the ants scurry about in total confusion, wondering what the hell just happened to their world…or so you imagine.  Perhaps you stomp like mad until the sand is compacted neatly back into the crevice and you’ve left a few ant corpses in your wake.  The bus pulls up…and the ants are forgotten.

Until the next day…when you happen to be waiting for the bus again and notice that it’s almost as if you never happened.  The little ant corpses have been retrieved and carried down into the bowels of the ant kingdom.  From the crevice magnificent sand spires once again protrude…perhaps not in the same place, but definitely in defiance of your supreme intervention.

Unlike ants though, humans take a lot longer to go about rebuilding their world.  I feel as if I would be doing a great disservice to the ants if I claimed that it was because of sentimentality or government red tape.  Who really knows what obstacles ants have to overcome in order to restore order to chaos?  I’d hate to belittle their efforts because of my ignorance.

So even then…sitting in the middle of my own disaster, staring around and wondering what the hell had happened, I knew that eventually I would have to rebuild.  I just didn’t know where to begin.  Also, I had to find the will to begin….which seemed to be in short supply at the moment.  There was a part of me that felt the futility of it…like building an ant colony in the middle of a busy sidewalk, or a sand castle too close to the water’s edge. 

The lesson I took away from all of this was simple.  Nothing lasts forever.  Not love…not life…nothing.  Perhaps it sounds rather cynical, but once you accept it there is a certain untouchable freedom.  If nothing lasts forever then pain and suffering were also just as transient.  All I had to do was survive it.

And that became my new plan.