The old adage that when “man plans, God laughs” describes all too well the year 2024.

It’s not that my well-scripted ’24 has been a particularly crappy year. I mean, seriously, remember 2020? We try to sweep it into the dark corners of our memory, treat it as ancient history, hope the gauziness of time softens the hard edges, but that one was hard to forget. You want to talk about a bad year? That was bad.

2024 hasn’t been that. Not even close. But, as it is in a lot of years (and in a lot of life), things this year haven’t gone quite as I, for one (and I know I’m not alone), would have hoped. Certainly things haven’t gone nearly as well as I had planned. When I remember this year, if it’s not swept too deeply into the dustbin of my brain, it will be as much for what went wrong as went right.

Let’s get this out of the way (understatement alert!): November stunk. It was really, really, painfully godawful. The worst. The proverbial poop in the punchbowl. I had hoped, maybe even expected in my wildest election fever dreams, that someone other than a convicted felon, sexual assaulter, and all-around douchebag would be picked as president of the United States. Didn’t happen. That kind of put a damper on the whole year. And it doesn’t portend well for 2025 and beyond, either.

Donald Trump’s election was a disaster, yes. But that was a hoping thing (I sure hope he doesn’t get elected) rather than a planning thing gone bad. If there was any planning that went south on that, blame the Democrats. Blame Joe Biden. Don’t blame me. I tried. A little.

2024, though, was no bowl of punch even before Trump and his followers fouled it up. Wars are still plodding on in the Middle East and in Ukraine. China is still flexing its biceps. The world, as a whole, leaves a lot to be desired in a lot of ways. Still.

Here, back home in the U.S., Donald and his minions of MAGA have been stirring things up for a while, everybody’s at everybody’s throats and in everybody’s business, traffic’s not getting any better anywhere, and most everybody’s a little nervous about what lies ahead. Artificial intelligence has been in the news all year. It’s either the answer to all society’s ills or an existential threat to us all. We had our requisite amount of school shootings, deadly storms, and other disasters. Now, to cap off a crummy year, Jimmy Carter just died. His legacy as a president is debatable. His personal legacy, as someone who lived a truly good, honest, selfless life, is not. We may never see someone so good in the White House again.

Again, though, death and heartache and disaster and bad drivers are something we deal with every year. You don’t plan on those kinds of things, or plan on avoiding them. You can’t.

The problem with ’24 was me. My planning. God is still laughing his butt off.

The result of my hubris this year — thinking that I could actually have a say in this thing! — has been relatively inconsequential, certainly compared to the death of a great man or the handing over of the presidency to a crook. But, you know, when it’s your life, it’s at least important to you.

I planned — just to give you a simple, meaningless-in-the-big-picture-of-things example — as I have for most of the last decade and a half, to play golf in May with my brothers in Pawleys Island, S.C. For various reasons, it didn’t happen. Schedules clashed. Budgets got tight. It soon became too evident that we were going to have to postpone, the first time in all those years that we even considered that. We finally pulled out a few rounds in late October. Still, I was scrambling most of the year to make sure our little tradition was kept alive, somehow.

A planned outing with one brother in North Carolina was mostly rained out. Another in Florida with another brother (I have a bunch) was washed out completely because of one of those big storms.

I know. Grand scheme, small potatoes. But these things aren’t nothing.

I planned, as I always do, our annual vacation. (Anyone who’s gone on a big vacation knows that they take some planning.) It was to be in Scandinavia in September. Had the itinerary mostly worked out. The flights nearly booked. The ground transportation was squared away, the fjords carefully picked.

As you can tell from the tense here, it wasn’t to be. Again, for various reasons. Family obligations. Work. Dogs to be sitted. No one to sit ours. It gets complicated.

While Scandinavia finally fell through, Mary Jo, Luke, and I managed to get in a few days of hiking in the North Georgia Mountains, when Luke was in town for a wedding. Mary Jo and I got out on our own, too, a little. To New York City in late April. To Jekyll Island later in the year to get a beach fix. But for the first time since I was 18 years old — we’re talking some years ago — I didn’t leave the Eastern Time Zone. All year.

Traveling was a big part of my semi-retired plans. Didn’t happen in ’24. All the chuckling is getting annoying.

More plans, of course, continue to be unfulfilled. Novel, still not written. Closet cleaning, basement emptying, landscape reworking, floor redoing, paint touchups, front porch stairs rebuilding, eating better … still, still, still, still, still, still, still no.

If this all sounds whiny — and it does, even to me — sure, there were high points of 2024. Saw Luke several times, including just this month, over Christmas (during which I picked up a nasty cold) and in Cincinnati in July for his grandparents’ 60th anniversary (when I contracted, for the first time, COVID; both unplanned, of course).

But, really, there’s no room for whining here, dashed plans or not. The family is healthy and happy. I’m creakier all over and some scalp is starting to show through, but I’m good. And in 2024, I had a few laughs. Did some good work. Ate some good meals. Saw a couple Broadway plays. Volunteered at the Chattahoochee Nature Center, where I learned about pine cones and the raptor-like calls of baby great blue herons and the beautiful American beech tree outside the window of our living room, and why all its leaves wither and brown but, for some reason, hang on until spring (it’s a process called marcescence).

I didn’t plan on learning about marcescence, or senescence, or abscission. But I’m glad I have, if only to show off in a blog post.

I guess, if there’s a point to this annual end-of-the-year musing, that’s it. Plans are fine. They are, often, absolutely necessary. But God’ll flick those measly to-dos off-course in an eyeblink, just for giggles, and all you can do is grin, bear it, be thankful for what you have, and try, try again.

(A quick pause in this sermon: I get that this plan-smashing is part of His big plan. He’s just reminding us of how good we have it, even in bad times. The Big Fella is tricky. I get it.)

(OK, on with the grinning, bearing, thanking, and try, try, trying again …)

Get to cracking on those closets. Put your head down and keep pounding on that novel. Dust off those travel plans, and make them better this time. Schedule a weekend getaway or 10, or a week or five in someplace different. If those trips fall through, schedule some others. Do more good work. Listen to good music. Eat better. Read good books (a quirk-filled fave of mine in ’24: Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino). Find the humor where you can. Share laughter. Be a good friend. Take on volunteering opportunities. (Maybe see if your local Democrats need some help. Because the Democrats definitely need some help.)

That’s what I’m planning for 2025. And I’m going to keep on planning.

So, what you got for me, Big Fella?