The Best Laid Plans

“All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net.”

Iris Murdoch from Under the Net

There is a danger in waiting for something we know is going to happen that we tinker so much with the anticipated plan and outcome that we may forget to attend to what is happening while we are waiting. The story becomes our life while opportunities for living drift past our distracted senses. This happens almost constantly in my life, I shift from nagging worries to visions of dream futures that will both probably never occur, or if they do they manifest in ways that I couldn’t possibly imagine because I am not paying attention to signs happening in the present that should give me a better indication of what is developing. I am mesmerized by the shadow show produced by me on the screen of my mind into thinking that I can predict the future accurately without attending to the present. It is my storytelling mind projecting images of desire and fear that I am paying attention to while I blindly stumble past myriad emergent circumstances and possible pathways that might mitigate possible problems or provide opportunities for the opening of my life into a truer connection with the world.

We all have a part of us that is continually extending our pasts into the future in a linear narrative based on what caused us pain or gave us pleasure all bound up in words and images like a screenplay for the director in our heads. Meanwhile, life is unfolding in real-time with subtle clues and cues not translatable into words requiring action in the moment. It is so easy to allow ourselves to be led by visions of what might be into the illusion of the future that will never exactly fit what we visualize.

I am not saying that we should not make any plans or dream about our future life, we just have to try to remove fear and reduce the amount of expectation so that we can take each step in getting there in the real world and not a reality constructed in our mind. There are no magic portals to lift us out of now to a place we want to be and that which we fear may never happen. We need to keep our senses open to the present as we arrange the future to the best of our abilities and leave fear and the desire for perfection out of our plans. Life is messy and must be lived one moment at a time. We will know our future when we get there.