Abandon your plans

I didn’t love “Moana 2.” I liked the first one a lot, but the sequel didn’t meet my expectations.

That’ll pay off, I promise. First, though, I have to provide some background.

I’m a writer. I mean, obviously. But, even outside of The Collegiate, writing is kind of my whole thing. I’ve been writing pretty much as long as I’ve been alive – plays, short stories, marketing copy, poems, films. In a career highlight, I even wrote a skit that my friend and I performed for our class during lunch one day in third grade. No footage of it exists, but I can assure you that I tell myself it’s truly art at its finest.

Despite how long I’ve been writing, though, I didn’t know I wanted to be a writer until a couple of years ago. I had to choose a field to go into at the end of high school, and I kind of just chose writing on a whim and hoped I was right. There’s a not-that-distant universe where I’m a film director instead. A handful of awards and a bunch of great experiences later, and I’m pretty sure I was right. But it’s not like I’ve had this premeditated path that I’m just floating through.

Part of being a writer, and of working toward a career in the arts in general, is the ever-present fear that I’m not actually good at this and that my time in this magical realm may be up at any moment. I have screenshotted every nice (and not nice, so long as it was constructive) thing anyone has ever told me about my work, as proof that I am good at what I do, for when I don’t feel like it. The truth is that I don’t know how much longer I’ll get to do this. I’m not planning on stopping, but I also wasn’t planning on becoming a filmmaker/playwright/journalist/graphic designer/actor/assistant stage manager/theatre scene shop assistant/musician/auctioneer (yes, really).

So, who knows?

This brings us to “Moana 2.” I got to spend Christmas last year aboard a Disney cruise ship, and I watched “Moana 2” in its theater on Christmas Eve. Though technically, since it started late in the evening, I started “Moana 2” on Christmas Eve and finished it just past midnight on Christmas Day.

About 30 minutes into Christmas morning, I stepped out of the theater and into the lobby, a grandiose space designed to fit thousands of people in it- currently, there were about four. I took in the overwhelming metaphorical whitespace, and a single thought took over my brain: I didn’t love “Moana 2.” I liked the first one a lot, but the sequel didn’t meet my expectations. (Told you it’d pay off.)

One part of it I did like, though, was my second favorite song in the movie, “Get Lost.” (My favorite was “Beyond.”) A lyric kept bouncing around in my head.

“Life’s unfair. It’s full of choices, big and small. But trust the fall and you can have it all.”

It’s not a great lyric. But it was a sentiment I was intimately familiar with at the time. For a plethora of personal reasons, I felt lost. I didn’t know what I was doing or where I was going, or who I wanted to be. I had just come out of a pretty good period in my life. And, though I was about to enter another one, I didn’t know that yet. At the time, all I knew was that nothing quite felt certain.

A few months earlier, I had met a friend (who will remain nameless since goshdarnit this is my story and I refuse to share the spotlight) who never scheduled anything in advance. Not out of principle, not to be difficult- they just wouldn’t. We’d make plans to hang out all the time, and we did- but if I ever asked for their availability ahead of time, they’d always say they wouldn’t know until the day of. Sure enough, my friend had a superpower for throwing plans together at the last minute- going to a concert, getting a group together to hang out, whatever it was. I was a little annoyed but endlessly impressed. For someone with a Google calendar as packed with overlapping colored blocks fighting for control as mine, that level of spontaneity just wasn’t on the table.

I thought of that friend in the aftermath of “Moana 2,” and of a new idea – maybe it was okay that I didn’t know where I was going.

In his book “The Anthropocene Reviewed,” author John Green calls the song “Auld Lang Syne” “genuinely wistful… it captures how each new year is a product of all the old ones.”

I’ve always felt a similar way about the future – I both fear and admire it, since it will be the product of every moment I’ve experienced so far, and also of this one.

But, the truth is that the future – of our nation in three centuries and our likelihood of getting to class on time tomorrow – isn’t a formula built on what we’ve done. It’s the ripple effects of our choices. And our choices are just the choice we’re in now, forever. We don’t make our future, we live it. And we’ll never know what could be or might be or will be. What is… is.

In the final song of the musical Rent, the whole company joins to declare “There’s only us, only tonight. We must let go to know what’s right. No other road, no other way, no day but today.”

If I had written Rent, the lyric would probably go “no day but all the days, because all the days are super important, and you need to pay attention to each of them. Though maybe focus more on today, since that’s the day you’re currently in.”

Admittedly, my version wouldn’t fit as well on a mug.

In the fall, I’ll be leaving GRCC and transferring to Ferris State University to join a program I’ve never been in on a campus I’ve never been to with people I’ve never met. I don’t know what’ll happen. I’m stuck between my today, all my other days and my wistful question mark of a future.

But I do know that I’m here – I rewatch “Friends” too much, I cry every time I hear “The Rainbow Connection,” I write 12 articles in my journalism class when I was supposed to write 6, I get too excited about finally owning a CD player, I think about the moment more than I live in it, I feel the joy of being around my friends (not the show) more than I can describe.

So, whatever happens from here, I’ll keep walking.

A single step becomes a journey as long as you don’t get in your own way.

Even if you do, that just becomes part of the journey.

There’s no such thing as a wrong step, as long as you take one.

One step at a time, each moment as it comes.

No day but today.

Onward.