All through life you’ll have people telling you that you need a plan. Everything needs a plan – big or small. So you need to plan how you’ll get from A to B, a plan for getting all your bits of work in on time, a plan for getting qualifications you need to do X or Y, a plan for getting that perfect job, a plan for earning the extra money you need to buy a car, you get the idea.

And once you have a plan, the perceived wisdom goes, you have to stick to it. And that’s where a lot of people come undone.

Truth is, life bowls googlies²⁷ at you every so often. And when that happens, your plan may well just go out of the window. The googlies can be good or bad, or indifferent, and sometimes you can’t tell until years later which they were. Here are just a few possibilities that could happen to you:

• You fall passionately in love with someone who is desperate to live abroad
• You’re diagnosed with a serious illness
• You’re offered a wonderful job opportunity in a field you’d never considered
• You or your partner become pregnant unexpectedly
• Someone close dies suddenly
• You go bankrupt
• Your job becomes redundant due to new technologies

Googlies throw your whole life up in the air, and there’s no knowing where it will land. Yes, make plans, but do it in the knowledge that you’ll be lucky to get through life without some of them being totally disrupted. Or is that unlucky? A bit of unpredictability can be a good thing, and I know people who have been through some of the life-changing experiences above and looked back later to see how positive they were: serious illness, unplanned pregnancy, bankruptcy, redundancy – sometimes these things can herald a brave new life, you just don’t know until it happens.

Sometimes, even without any of life’s googlies, it’s good to change things around a bit, be open to new possibilities, throw things up in the air. It doesn’t do to get stuck in a rut. So always be prepared to be knocked off course – to go off map – whether the impetus comes from you or from an unexpected direction.

Whether the experience turns out to have been positive or negative, it will make you wonder why on earth you sweated so much over formulating and developing that perfect plan, when you find yourself somewhere totally different. I know someone who agonised over whether to go to university or drama school, and then ended up working in an African mission for 15 years because of a chance event.