Unplanned

If there is something we all want more of, more than money or security or even health, it is time. And yet, if I think about why I want more time, it isn't for new experiences or new friends. It's so I might finish things I had already planned to do, but which have taken longer than expected because of distractions or diversions. And there's the rub. As if I could plan my life around the possibility there might not be diversions. As if I would even want a life without diversions.

Most of the people I have had the good fortune to be loved by have all concerned themselves with my life having a plan. I do think planning is important. It is one way we can make many things fit into a short time or to make things possible which require a complicated sequence of events to occur in a given order. Planning is essential. But planning has its limits. Planning makes its limits.

I talk to people everyday who have plans – their days and evenings are filled with “things they have to do”. I think about the things I have to do. I could make a really long list if I wanted to feel busy or overworked or over-important, but in the end, there is really very little that I absolutely have to do on any given day.

Instead of mastering our lives by our plans, our plans become our masters as we allow our days to become indiscriminately filled with tasks and checklists. From alarm clocks to dayplanners, we have created the shackles which chain us to a particular future conceived in a youthful moment and planned in great detail but with very little reflection. We sacrifice the graphical white space in our days in which the incidental miracles occur, filling every available moment with the tasks which will forseeably contribute to the plan. In the pursuit of our end, the means of our days become chores instead of choices.

Our evolution and technological development have relieved us of the burden of spending the majority of our time gathering and preparing food. We have traded the bond of the hunt and the communion of a love-labored meal for insubstantial nutrition consumed in solitude for two minutes and thirty seconds at a drive through window. Instead of seeking out food, we use this time we have stolen from our family and friends to commute ever farther each day in search of some greater meaning in our lives. Ironically, it seems, the search itself and the constant activity of our “easier” lifestyle, has denied us the very experiences where meaning is most often found.

Our planning and the subsequent fear of wastefulness has not saved time, but rather devalued it. Reduced it to the hours in a day and the minutes in an hour because they are quantifiable. How impractical to mark time by the quality of a conversation or the thoughtfulness of meditation in a quiet moment.