It’s fifteen days into the new year. I blinked and here we are, midway through January. With that said, today I’m sharing some insight on where I’ve been this last year and where I plan to go in the next.

Plans are funny little things. If they weren’t, Death Cab for Cutie wouldn’t have written an entire album about them. Not only do we make plans for ourselves, but we make plans for others in our lives, sometimes subconsciously.  The prevalent problem with this occurs when someone does not meet the plans we created for them. Those lovely plans. The ones we carefully curated and deliberately arranged, like wild flowers neatly bound by belief and good intentions. Good intentions and, of course, a level of misplaced predictability about the future—or others in general. I’ll be the first to raise my hand and admit that I’m guilty of this.

It’s like writing. Readers generally don’t enjoy interruptions like an errant apostrophe or sentence fragment. Readers like to be able to predict where you’re heading from a syntactical perspective. This precise handling of language is something I admire in some of my favorite writers. And sometimes I wish that life could be as easily manipulated as words. But my loved ones are not characters, and I am no one’s protagonist.

Tim and I moved to Chicago a little over two months ago. I was offered a new position within my company at the end of August. Within two months, we had packed up, sold our home, and found ourselves traveling across the country in small, overcrowded cars, with two cats and a dog in tow. To say the news came as a shock to our families and friends would be an understatement. Generally, people were happy for us and excited about our new adventure. Some, however, had other sentiments.

“I think it’s a bad idea.”

“There are too many unknowns.”

“You like your lives here. Why would you want to leave?”

The thing is, in the time leading up to accepting the position (and even until several weeks after arriving in our new home), thoughts like these crossed my mind daily. However, hearing the words from someone else’s mouth had a more devious way of falsifying any efforts I made to be positive. Simultaneously, it reinforced my fears about concerns which, although legitimate, I otherwise felt comfortable navigating. I’m thankful to have had a boss who repeatedly told me, “It’s all logistics.” Those words became my mantra. And guess what? We got through the toughest parts.

I’m not suggesting that we say nothing if we see our loved ones walking into a universally bad situation. What I am saying is to evaluate whether we are more inclined to share words of comfort or praise based on whether our loved ones are meeting the expectations that we had set forth for them.

I’ve been surprising myself for as long as I can remember. I surprised myself when I asked my parents to send me to a different high school than all my beloved grammar school friends. I surprised myself when I took five straight years of German classes, one in which I met my husband. I surprised myself when I decided to go back to school for a second degree, not in English but in business management. I surprised myself when I took a job in the financial services industry. And I surprised myself again when I moved to Illinois.

There is value in making plans. Plans motivate you to achieve more than the status quo, and they hold you accountable to evaluate whether (and in what ways) you are growing. And when things do go according to plan, it feels good. However, my life has shattered the plans that I’ve had for myself (and surely some that others have had for me) over and over. I’ve learned to embrace and love the unexpected whims within myself. And this year, I intend to extend that love to those around me. To learn to simply love watching others live—with no expectations.