Field Notes on Starting Over: Note #7—Starting Over Without a Master Plan

Why you don’t need a roadmap for every journey

As dread and overwhelm set in thinking about the upcoming changes this year, I try to remind myself that I have been here before—fleeing one life to begin a new one somewhere else—but what was an adventure at 20 and 30 is just a pain in the ass at 40. So, I’m not going to sugarcoat this.

It sucks.

This is not where I expected to be in my life at this stage of the game. I have no real plan because I have learned how illusory carefully laid plans can be—life has a way of derailing them. I used to have five and ten year plans. I used to have an exhaustively detailed itinerary scheduled in advance for trips. But then I realized that—because of all the storms that bring down trees to block our paths, the road construction that forces us to deviate from our preplanned course, and the frequency with which the GPS of life refreshes and has us driving in circles while chanting “rerouting”— it’s perfectly fine to not have a roadmap for every journey. Sometimes, you just have to know where you don’t want to go.

So, what do you do when “not this” is all you know? How do you stay in motion when you don’t know where you’re going yet?

1. “Not this” is still information

You don’t need a grand vision or master plan in order to begin again—sometimes all you have is resistance. People often underestimate the wisdom of discomfort. Discomfort can lead to redirection. Dissatisfaction and a growing sense of “not this” pave the path to curiosity. People think reinvention requires clarity first. In reality, clarity often arrives after motion. Most reinventions come about as a Plan B. They’re what happen when our picture-perfect Plan A’s crash and burn or never come to fruition to begin with.

At every crossroads in my life, before I was able to decide where I was going, I first had to acknowledge that I couldn’t (and didn’t want to) stay where I was. The question stopped being How do I fix this? and became How do I get myself the hell out?

2. Curiosity can replace certainty

When confidence is shaky, curiosity is steadier. Curiosity asks better questions than certainty. Even when a plan hasn’t revealed itself yet, we can move forward anyway if we follow our curiosity. That motion matters more than the destination because stagnation can set in if we sit around waiting for permission or clarity to come along.

So, I’ve been doing what you do when certainty is unavailable. I am allowing myself to get curious and imagine other possibilities from my current reality.

On Google Maps for the new city I’ll be moving to, I’ve been saving cafés, bookshops, and restaurants I want to try. I’ve joined Meetup groups I haven’t attended yet and Facebook pages advertising events going on in the city. I’m imagining a version of myself who exists there, even if that image isn’t fully formed yet.

Moving back to my home country wasn’t a part of some master plan. It’s a placeholder for possibility. I didn’t choose it because I’m certain, I chose it because it’s where my visa allows me to land. I’m not trying to convince myself this new city will be the place. I’m just trying to believe it could be a place — one where I can arrive before I decide anything else.

3. Clarity tends to arrive retroactively

Sometimes, big life decisions make sense only in hindsight. Coherence is something we assign later. Trusting the process requires releasing the need to narrate it too early. If all you have right now is curiosity and the courage to keep moving, that might be more than enough.

The truth about provisional planning is that it is inherently ambiguous. I can rent an Air BnB in advance, apply to some jobs beforehand and see what sticks, but I won’t really know what’s possible, won’t have a lay of the land until I am physically there, boots on the ground.

I can get my ducks in a row to the best of my abilities, but if you’ve ever watched a mother duck try to keep her ducklings in check, you’ll know there’s always a straggler who likes to go off on side quests.

My life the last few years has felt like one giant side quest. Maybe it will all make sense someday, but today is not that day. And I’m learning to be ok with a little purposeful ambiguity.

Since my early traveling days complete with detailed itinerary, down-to-the-hour schedules, accommodation booked well in advance, I have mellowed a lot and become quite fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants—my new motto being “let’s play it by ear.” Plans can emerge post-arrival.

The map can’t be fully drawn until after the journey begins.

All this to say

I don’t have a master plan. I have a one-way flight, a temporary address, and a willingness to let life meet me where I land.

For now, that’s enough. Sometimes starting over isn’t about knowing where you’re going—it’s about trusting that clarity can wait until after you arrive. And how do you know you can trust yourself when you don’t have a plan?

Because you’ve done this before. You don’t gain confidence prior to starting over. You gain it by surviving previous versions of uncertainty. By midlife, we are rarely starting over from true scratch without any experience to inform us. Looking back on your life, you’ll probably discover that you didn’t always have a master plan either. You just took the next workable step. Remembering that makes it easier to trust ourselves now—even when the future is blurry.

Roadmaps—even global maps—are constantly evolving, revised and redrawn as we gain new information. That’s why they aren’t written in stone.

Maybe our futures work the same way.

Life is a no-map zone