I love Alice In Wonderland because so much of life feels like that story. All the craziness – croquet mallets that turn into flamingos and queens yelling “off with their heads” - can be (disturbingly) familiar.
But my favorite is the conversation between the Cheshire Cat and Alice:
Alice: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
Cheshire Cat: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
Alice: “I don’t much care – “
Cheshire Cat: “Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.”
This dialogue is well known, but it goes a bit further:
Alice: “ – so long as I get somewhere …
Cheshire Cat: “Oh, you’re sure to do that … if you only walk long enough.”
I guess this is what we might call goal planning in today’s parlance. Decide where we are going and then figure out how to get there. So much easier said than done. Many of us bump along in life, especially when young, with maybe a vague sense of direction and purpose. There are always those who knew they were going to be a surgeon when they were 7 years old, but the rest of us might have taken a bit longer to find our path. And that does not even include things like partners and spouses and children. Life can be daunting. Fun and adventuresome, but still, daunting.
When you see a lawyer about estate planning and are asked what you want to do with what you have, you are really being asked to continue that walk. When you leave this earth, what would you like to do with what you have? Where will it go? What do you want to say now that you have gotten “somewhere”?
The journey we started long ago continues with what we leave behind. Not just our money and our “stuff”, but our thoughts and ideas and letters. We will someday have walked long enough to get to where we wanted to go even if we got there inadvertently. Maybe it makes sense to plan for the final journey too. The next somewhere.
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