AncienTrails

81  bar steady  29.84  0mph NE  dew-point 66   Summer, hot and muggy

Full Thunder Moon

“Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.” – Thomas Alva Edison

I like Edison here.  He illustrates a fundamental flaw in the planning paradigm.  When we plan, we have a criteria for success.  Most planners see that as the summum bonum of the plan.  I know I did when I worked as an organizational consultant in churches and other organizations.  Time-limited, quantifiable and concrete.  That way you know one when you see one.

The problem here?  Just what Edison says.  The serendipitous.  Think of Roentgen who saw his hand on a photographic sensitive paper while working with radioactive material.  Not the point.  But.  Roentgen saw X-rays.  The North St. Paul 3-M’er who worked on glues and found one that didn’t work so well.  He used it for a while to stick notes in his hmynbooks.  Then.  Oh, Post-It notes.

The problem is deeper yet.  Plans and goals put us into a pass/fail world where our progress or lack of it runs up and down a scale, with our self-image and our sense of self-worth often traveling along for the ride.  In fact, life offers so much to us, whether we write that bestseller or become an academic superstar or get straight A’s or climb the mountain or ski the double black diamond or not, that too often the important parts of life get overlooked in the scramble to meet the plan.

A child’s smile.  A flower opened, beautiful, transient.  A partner’s caress.  A dog’s eager greeting.  The smell of fresh cut hay.  A tomato fresh from the garden.  A shooting star.  A full moon.  None of these come according to plan.  They come only with attentiveness, when we live in the now and notice not the graph headed up the chart, but the beating of our own heart and the breath of our own soul.

Plans.  As Scrooge might say, Bah, Humbug.  Buy that Christmas goose and pass out alms for the poor.  All better than getting the account books done on a holiday.

Here’s a shot I took this morning.  When I take my camera outside on these muggy days, the lens fogs up.  I often clean it, but this time I decided to shoot anyway.  This is corn in the mist.