• Tag Archives plans
  • Corn in the Mist

    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.

    cornmist500.jpg


  • Watch My Heartbeats

    1  64%  17%  3mph NNE bar30.47 waindchill-3 Winter

              Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    A light snow has begun to fall though we don’t have snow in the forecast.  A good three inches of snow would be good about now.  A freshening.

    Yesterday evening I had begun to feel adrift, purposeless.  This sometimes happens to me after a productive time, when I slow down the engine keeps racing for a while.  Need one of those fans that cools the engine after the ignition’s turned off.

    This morning, rested and fed, I know I have plenty to do.  There’s always that novel to write and stories to market.  The vegetable planning needs to move forward a few more steps.  I can always study Chinese characters, read Taoism or plow into one of the Asian art books I have.

    Something I need to do sooner is prepare an hour’s worth of presentation for the Woolly Retreat next week, though I suppose I could do that during my day at Dwelling in the Woods ahead of the others. 

    This morning Kate and I have a family business meeting, an every Thursday thing, and I have some errands to run.  Meds and a new battery for my Polartech watch.  The watch gives me my heartbeat during aerobic workouts, hard to do them without it.


  • The Fog of Everyday Life

    35  54%  34%  7mph  windroseENE bar rises dewpoint20 First Quarter of the Snow Moon    Holiseason

    The great tragedy of Science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

    Thomas H. Huxley (1825 – 1895)

    Whenever I read something about war, especially from a general staff perspective, this observation comes up:  “A battle plan never survives contact with the enemy.”  This represents several attitudes at once.  Humility, in that no plan can entertain every contingency created by others with free will opposed to it.  CYA, in that it provides cover for even the bad plan, for it too will not survive contact with the enemy.   Hopefulness, in that it apparently assumes that despite this problem, somehow, things will come out ok. 

    A paraphrase might be, no plan survives contact with reality.  That is to say, no intellectual effort, a non-dimensional rendering of a complex, 4-D world, can guide us unerringly in the nitty gritty of daily life.

                                         Reality is a crutch for people who can’t cope with drugs.
                                                           – Lily Tomlin

    All this explains why I’m not done with my tour.  The cursed enemy of groceries and filing and e-mails were ugly facts, real obstacles that rose up and overwhelmed my plan.  In days gone by I would become anxious about this, troubled.  Now, I’m merely frantic.  I have all the stuff out, I’ve done most of the objects before, and I’m bound to know more than the high school students.  This all provides me with the long ago experience of college when a report or test was imminent and other ugly facts like beer and women and politics had crossed my path and torn up my plans.

    At some point in all this mental milling around, I come back to this, “This is why you’ve not done more with your life.  You bum.”  This occurs especially when I read about someone like Jacque Barzun who, at age 100, just published his 38th book.   If I publish one a year from now till my 100th birthday, I could just catch him.  Well, I guess there is still time. 

    Next comes:  Oh, geez.  Come on now.  You love your life and realize how lucky you are.  How grateful you are for what you have and for what you’ve been able to do with your life.  Then, I nod, get up and go work out.  Out, out, damned fact.