Everyone seems much more efficient today than yesteryear.
There are many people writing books and selling programs emphatically stating that you must plan every step of the way if you intend to reach your goal.
If you don’t plot everything out far in advance and factor in every little detail, you’re chances of success become dismal.
Even people’s personal lives are scheduled weeks in advance, sometimes months in advance.
And while there’s merit to planning, I believe we assign to it more importance than it deserves.
If you have a goal, a mark you need to make then, sure, some planning is essential. But even then there are no guarantees, are there? The reality is, you never know what tomorrow will bring.
You plan your tiny details, but there’s a bigger plan you have no control over.
I suppose the idea of planning each day, week, and month down to the final minute and expecting ourselves to perform like machines seem contrary to nature. We’re not robots; we shouldn’t aim to be machine-like.
Take a sunset, for example. We know the sun will set, but we never know exactly how the colors of the sunset will spread. It’s always a surprise. While there’s a cosmic plan in place that we can know, the details which will embellish the plan are hidden.
When I ponder the events that led to various successes in my life, most of them were unplanned. I’m just now beginning to plan more because the planning gurus keep telling me that’s what I have to do.
But, on second thought, I’m not so sure I agree with them. Take this morning, for example.
I planned to write this today first thing in the morning, and while I’m a little late because I steered off course, I’ll still accomplish the goal set for my morning writing session (barely!).
What made me digress? I’d reached a suspenseful part in a history book I’m reading and, because the book has been difficult to read, I chose to take advantage of the suspense and stay with the flow of reading.
Hence, I shirked my morning schedule.
Had I followed the planning gurus, I would have put my book down just as the King of the Medes was holding a banquet to revenge a perceived wrong by one of his most trusted men, Harpagus, by serving Harpagus the flesh of his son.
Who could stop here?
So I kept reading, putting me behind by one hour in my writing schedule (but also one hour ahead in my reading schedule). The delay made for a fascinating morning read and for what I’m sure will lead to many interesting thoughts throughout the day.
How does one endure such cruelty and not so much as flint when you discover you are dining on the flesh of your own child? How can someone inflict such cruelty? And how can such an egregiously wronged man have the patience to wait years before taking his revenge?
Believing that we can write our own scripts by plotting our lives is an illusion.
It’s contrary to the nature of life which is too full of the unknown to predict it’s outcomes. There is nothing scientific about life’s events.
I agree that we should have a vision, a general direction of where we are headed and determine our priorities, but to schedule ourselves religiously, week after week, is to miss out on what makes life most interesting: the unknown.
Instead of aiming to become more efficient, therefore, I think we should try to be less efficient.
I don’t want to know what the sunset is going to look like beforehand: I want to experience the surprise and splendor of it as it comes into being.
And I want to know how Harpagus gets his revenge!
