Structure

Some say it’s better to picture a house and the process it undergoes before it becomes a home. They say before the house is built there has to be a plan, a structure of some sort, and once it’s a house further structuring will be needed if there’s any hope of creating the perfect home you pictured. They say it’s the same with life, we have these little plans that we put in motion hoping it leads to this remarkable picture we have in our minds, but a lot of us fail to acknowledge the importance of structuring everything that lies within those little plans.

With only 24 hours in a day, a lot of us may find that having some form of structure throughout the day keeps us sane - helps us to get from point A to B easier and quicker – usually these daily objectives are performed with a larger goal in mind and we know by following a particular schedule or plan we’ll accomplish something greater. But what if structure is just not your thing? What if planning your whole life around your apparent lifetime dream just seem too restrictive and stressful to think about?  What if you just want to go about life doing whatever, in the hope it leads to something tolerable or remarkable? I don’t think lacking structure in your life prevents you from accomplishing just as much as anyone else that structured their path to success; it just means you’re wired differently, open to unpredictability, and you choose to let your life find its own structure rather than forcing it to be this perfect image you mentally designed.

Structure or not life has a way of surprising us all; structure or not failure is something you may have to face and if you do it’s best you keep going: if you need structure then create a plan B, if you don’t need it then stop and think about what to do next but more importantly do what makes you happy. Personally, I think structure like many things in life is overrated, it may be needed but it’s overrated. I think it’s best to do joyous things that leads to something you’ll be proud of, rather than doing things you feel you have to (despite not being happy with), in the hopes it would lead to something you dreamed about but not entirely sure will leave you feeling content in the end. Sometimes life has a structure already laid out for us, one that could bring about more than we ever imagined, but because we’ve got other plans…

“Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.” - Richard Russo