No Real Plan

Mango trench
Wilfred sweater (similar)
Zara jeans (similar)
Mango sneakers (similar)
Chanel handbag
Celine sunglasses
Linjer rings (c/o) (similar)
Mejuri earrings (similar)
Location: Musee du Louvre – Paris, France

Paris, October 11, 2021

Dear friends,

Today, I’m thinking about our early days in Paris. Reflection is inevitable, when you travel back and forth to the same city year after year. Every trip brings back memories of the last one, and every one before that. It seems fitting that my early memories of the city are on my mind today. While we’re taking these photos on a sunny October afternoon after lunch with friends, it will be months before they make their way to this space, my words along with them. By the time I press the Publish button, it will be January fourth of 2022, just a little less than thirteen years before a day that changed my life forever; on January 12, 2009, Ian and I moved, somewhat on a whim, to Paris for the first time.

We had no real plan, when we made that move. We were both on leaves of absence from jobs we didn’t care much for and had no serious plans to return to. I’d done nothing practical, like researching work visas or what it would take to stay in Paris. We bought plane tickets and flew to Paris. That was it.

It seemed so simple, at the time. I was twenty-three, with no deep commitments, no thoughts of eventual retirement and a still limited understanding of the reality of paying bills every month (even though I’d lived on my own since I was nineteen; somehow, it just hadn’t sunk in that those bills would just keep coming, month after month, for the rest of my life.) I wanted to do something, so I did it.

We approached most of the time we spent in Paris in 2009 that way. To the best of my recollection, we never set an alarm to wake up in the morning. We decided how we wanted to spend each day over breakfast in the morning, only planning trips out of the country in advance. That meant sometimes we left home at 8 am, and sometimes we left at noon. No two days were the same. There was no plan, we were just living.

Looking back, part of me wants to say that it was simple because things were simpler then, but that isn’t it. I was simpler. I was young, still building on the experiences and knowledge that would shape the person I was to become. And I needed to try different things, experiment with different ways of being to figure out what I liked and wanted. Now, it seems like every twenty-three-year-old is fully formed, sophisticated beyond their years, in charge of a personal brand. Maybe some twenty-three-year-olds were like that back then, too, but not me. I still had so much learning and growing to do.

That’s not to say I don’t still have things to learn, because I do, and that I can’t still grow, because I hope to. But at thirty-six, I am, more or less, a fully formed human being with a fixed idea of who she is and the place she occupies in the world. I wake up to an alarm at the same time every day now, even when on vacation in Paris. There is a plan for every day, every hour, and certainly every outfit. I am a master of overthinking myself into inaction. I have deep commitments, stacks of bills to pay and a neverending to do list. The idea of just doing anything seems unfathomable.

…and yet. After lunch, we walk over the Pont des Arts and I stop Ian to take photos within the Louvre complex because I see a beige door that I like. Afterwards, we decide to walk home instead of taking the metro, because it’s not, “that far.” (For Parisians, it isn’t.) And then, ultimately, we pass home. I want a glass of wine, it’s a beautiful day, and the terrasse at Le Progres is empty, so I do it.

It’s perfect, in the way that nothing you plan truly can be. When you plan, you bring a set of expectations to whatever you do and thereby invariably risk disappointment. They say that when you fail to plan, you plan to fail. But when you plan, you often fail to see possibilities and alternative that deviate from your single course.

A little less than thirteen years ago, I took a chance that changed my life: moving to Paris. It was a risk. Many people, most notably my boss, tried to talk me out of it. It’s true I might have been further ahead in my career by now if it weren’t for my decision to buy that plane ticket. But I’ve never once regretted it. Today, as I sit at Le Progres, wine in hand, I can’t help but think how glad I am that this is the way things turned out. And I wonder, too, how my future life might look different if I planned a little bit less, and just lived a little bit more.

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