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Adamantium
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19 Oct 2013, 7:26 am

I have been preparing for many days or weeks for several events this weekend and learned yesterday evening that I cannot attend them.

I had a hard time getting to sleep last night and feel very loaded with useless, incoherent energy this morning. I am completely out of sorts.

I won't go into the details, but let's just say that I analyzed the requirements for attending these events/activities and the degree of preparation involved and saw that there were certain dependency trees for each. Transportation to the physical location, background knowledge, cash outlays, free times--any activity in life is full of this sort of thing and I like to be prepared to execute a plan efficiently, knowing that contingencies are covered, etc.

Being prepared in this way is just about the only way I can enjoy anything. If I don't have a clear picture of the dependencies involved, I will feel anxious. I know that "no plan survives first contact with the enemy" is a reality that applies to all of life--and I will get stuck, possibly in a bad moment, if I haven't done a certain amount of background prep: recon, supplies, maps, contacts, reserves, plan b, plan c.

I keep trying to start doing things this morning, but this sense of inertia from the broken plans for this morning is making life difficult. I can't seem to switch gears, reallocate background processes, run garbage collection on the now useless variables and resources that I had lined up for this weekend.

I suppose it's a sort of mental and emotional conservation of momentum. I am not enjoying it.
Perhaps this is just disappointment at the change in plans. Perhaps if I reorganize the garage energetically this feeling will go away.

It has occurred to me that the way that this sort of change puts me out of equilibrium may be related to autism. Do you have similar difficulties with sudden changes of plans?



leafplant
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19 Oct 2013, 7:34 am

Absolutely. I realised this very early on in my childhood and subsequently did everything I could not to have routines and not to make plans. It still doesn't work just in a different way.

As for your particular problem, I think you just forgot to plan for the change of plans.



droppy
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19 Oct 2013, 9:53 am

I get upset if my routine changes, but I don't really have issues with changes of plans-because I almost never make plans :lol:
I am not good at planning, and I seldom do. Most of the times I am just spontaneous and just do what my mind tells me to do at a given moment. When I want to do things I just do them, without a specific order and without thinking of the when and where.
Whenever I make plans I can't follow them :lol:



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19 Oct 2013, 10:07 am

For me, a change of plans, is, in an understatement, annoying. In correct terms, it is one of the worst thlings ever.



Adamantium
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19 Oct 2013, 12:36 pm

So: I expended the energy on a walk in the woods. Very good therapy.
I found a guided walk in a local nature preserve with a focus on native trees and wildflowers through Meetup. This is not something I have ever done before.

I believe the intensity of agitation I was feeling this morning was caused by several factors around the unexpected change of plans:

1. Financial stress. The change was caused by an unexpected expense that killed all available funds for the planned activities (this is intrinsically frustrating).

2. All armored up, and nowhere to go. The three events I had been planning to attend were all in some way social: an organized D&D/Pathfinder game, a concert in Manhattan and an ASAN NJ meeting. Each of these events is something which is well within my ability to do, but also represents a considerable drain on my energy and sustained use of that part of myself that's dedicated to getting along with others, handling that feeling of not knowing what to do, reading signals, etc, I have to get mentally prepared to do that, and having done that work and suddenly having nowhere to go with it was untenable. I had to find a way to clear it.

3. I hate to feel thwarted. It's hard to plan these things and to plan and then not be able to execute somehow feels like failure internally and I despise that feeling.

So I did something atypical and went on a different event for which I had done no preparation. It had the advantage of being free, local, and an activity (hiking) I am very, very familiar and comfortable with. Also, as a sort of social event it had in common with the organized Pathfinder game a structure and some leadership that I could rely on rather than being a person at sea in a crowd of others (like a party.)

Anyway, it was really good. I learned a lot about invasive species, native trees and wildflowers, saw the beauty and horror of nature in the woods and spent some time alone after the group broke up.The geology of that wildland is also quite interesting--the whole park is built on these massive basalt ridges the welled up through cracks in the Newark Basin 200 million years ago. Many terrains from very ancient to quite (geologially) recent converge here. One of the results is that there are little cliffs and ledges that stand out from the surrounding soils.

I stood for a moment next to a large rock from the Jurassic, thinking about time, and hearing nothing but the wind in the leaves. As my eyes scanned the lichens on the back of the rock, I heard birds calling from nearby and distant points in the forest and thought of them as the surviving dinosaurs, following territorial and reproductive strategies as old as the rock and I thought about the incredible complexity of the symbiotic relationships that sustain a collective entity like that forest... and I was happy and at peace.

Pretty good for a day that started with feelings of being thwarted, knocked out of joint and vaguely doomed!



leafplant
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20 Oct 2013, 9:23 am

Adamantium wrote:

Pretty good for a day that started with feelings of being thwarted, knocked out of joint and vaguely doomed!


Wonderful! And you achieved it by being spontaneous which gives you bonus points :)

Going on a walk in the nature always re-sets me when I am out of sorts.