What does it mean to have a plan? I used to date someone who had scheduled the vacations they wanted and were going to take up to five years in advance. As if in the course of living life, day to day, in the period between then and now, the world and their attitude toward it, their wants and desires, their situation in any way, would not have changed. Like parents who buy a Subaru because they believe it will be the perfect car to pass off to their children when they are of driving age. Never mind that hopefully in the 15 years you own that car that automotive technology will not advance to such a point that your current vehicle will be hopelessly outdated and definitely out of style.
Sure, it makes sense to store your nuts for the winter, so that when that time of your discontent (or retirement or inability to continue working frenetically) inevitably comes that you and yours will have at least a store of protein to consume. But even though we watch our grandparents and parents make that slow decline into autumn, it’s difficult to imagine the scope and breadth of shit you’re going to have to adjust for as you get older. For one thing, despite what you do to delay it, old age, infirmity, and decrepitude are coming. For you, just like everyone else. Regardless of how gentle or fiercely you go into that good night, the darkness is going to get you. It’s just a question of time. And time, of course, is relative. Eihei Dogen, the Japanese Zen master, predated the theories of quantum physics by about 600 years when he suggested that the “passage” of time is imaginary. There is only the current moment, in which (and only in which) all the future and past exist. Time travel is impossible, if only because when you choose a past or future to revisit, whose time is it? You are not the same person you were five minutes ago, let alone when you attended elementary school or who you will be when you grow up and out of it. To suggest otherwise, to imagine yourself the same at 20 as at 50, is to, as Muhammad Ali quipped, “waste 30 years of your life.” Your purpose is to grow, to change. To grow old. To live and die. To borrow a finite amount of energy for a finite time, and then give it back.
You want to make the gods laugh, they say, make a plan. But “they” also say you should live as if you’re going to die tomorrow, but save as if you’re going to live forever. Forever, of course, being an impossible condition outside the controlling principles of cause and effect. In other words, not reality. We struggle to make a meaningful contribution to the world in less than 100 years. How much more difficult, depressing, soul-crushing, and ultimately useless is an infinite lifetime’s worth of failure?
But everybody’s supposed to have a plan, right? Especially, when they look to be doing something we disagree with, they’re supposed to have a Plan B. A backup, a strategy. But if you think about it, there has not been a single, 24-hour period of time for any being that ever existed or will exist where everything has gone the way they wanted or expected it.
So is the answer to let go of expectations? Forget the results and lose yourself in the doing? Maybe. Maybe not. Just like a car will only go so far on a half tank of gas, the human body and mind can only function for a limited number of miles without refueling or checking the engine lights. And preventative maintenance IS a plan, isn’t it? You gotta eat.
Maybe it’s more like a religion – in that EVERY religion, regardless of its number of adherents or how ironclad its promises or doctrine, is always just a single generation from extinction. We are all in that sense merely living from paycheck to paycheck. Even the most tight-fisted billionaire can lose it all in a few minutes on the stock market. It’s unpredictability that puts the living into a life. Otherwise, you might as well be an automaton serving a will greater than yourself with no time off for good behavior.
Honestly, what’s the difference anyway? If there IS a greater or higher purpose or being or driving energy or calling or destination, greater than you, right here and now, how would you recognize it when you saw it? Could you in fact even see it? How can you really come to grips with something truly extrasensory, extraordinary, superhuman?
Would you be able to determine whether that super-something was encouraging you, creating constant roadblocks, or simply laughing its divine ass off?
If you could interpret the language of the gods, could you then easily slip back into the linga franca of humanity, of mere mortal communication? Or would you be, like someone who is able to distinguish the fabric and meter of the universe while high on LSD, unable to translate your all-absorbing experience in the land and speech of the trip into your common, ordinary, mundane and altogether boring mother tongue?
Ultimately, does it really matter whether you have a solid plan? If you’re going to be alive, truly and absolutely alive in this moment, what difference does it matter what has happened, what you imagined you wanted to happen, what might happen, and what is possible? It’s not really like Sherlock Holmes quipped, that once you’ve eliminated the impossible, some part of the possible, no matter how impractical, must be the truth. The Truth, with a capital T, is that anything that can happen does happen. In fact, it’s already happening. Or you wouldn’t be able to think of it, or plan for it, or NOT plan for it.
They teach you in project management that planning is just a spoke in an ever-turning wheel that spins from through initiation through planning to execution, monitoring and closing. Not in big grandiose cycles, but in tiny, easily measurable segments. But keeping up with that rhythm isn’t as easy as it sounds. Far from it. The trick, if there is a trick at all – because a “trick” requires you to be a separate observer who thinks if they watch closely enough they can see the “secret” mechanics for how the master magician achieves their sleight of hand. Learning the trick means a denial of all magic altogether – including that magic that right now is considered science and therefore physiologically, psychologically, and metaphysically not only possible, but predictable. No the secret to the project cycle is that everything is infinitely small. So infinite, in fact, that it is finite. But measuring, as Sri Ramakrishna pointed out, is itself a tricky business. We are all just dolls made out of salt, who think by wandering out into the ocean we can accurately measure its salinity.
03 MAR 2025
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