☕ saturday mornings - February 26, 2022
loving your decisions, not minding what happens & planning life
Good morning all!
Happy Saturday. I hope you’re having an excellent start to your weekend.
Below is your edition of “saturday mornings”, a weekly recap of the coolest things I’ve been pondering and exploring this week.
Thanks for being here.
Total read time (bolded sections) = 2 minutes
Total read time (all) = 6 minutes
✍️ Quote I’m pondering:
"The more you love your decisions, the less you need others to love them.”
— Hussein Nishah
📖Book passage I loved:
This is a long one but, trust me, it’s worth the read.
“The version of this thought that has always resonated the most for me comes from the modern-day spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, who expressed it, in a characteristically direct manner in a lecture delivered in California in the late 1970s.
“Partway through this particular talk,” recalls the writer Jim Dreaver, who was in attendance, “Krishnamurti suddenly paused, leaned forward, and said, almost conspiratorially, ‘Do you want to know what my secret is?’
Almost as though we were one body, we sat up... I could see people all around me lean forward, their ears straining, their mouths slowly opening in hushed anticipation.” Then Krishnamurti “said in a soft, almost shy voice, ‘You see, I don’t mind what happens.’”
I don’t mind what happens... I don't think Krishnamurti means to say that we shouldn’t feel sorrow, compassion, or anger when bad things happen to ourselves or others, nor that we should give up on our efforts to prevent bad things from happening in the future.
Rather, a life spend “not minding what happens” is one lived without the inner demand to know that the future will conform to your desires for it—and thus without having to be constantly on edge as you wait to discover whether or not things will unfold as expected...
To the extent that we can stop demanding certainty that things will go our way later on, we’ll be liberated from anxiety in the only moment it ever actually is, which is this one.”
— Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman
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❓ Question for reflection:
How much of life have you missed from over planning or under planning?
We tend to make thoughtful, detailed plans. Whether it’s for large events, like your vacation or career path, or small events, like your day.
Yet our plans often get derailed when they clash with the unpredictability of reality. And this can be a major source of frustration, aggravation, and stress. When things “don’t go our way”.
But, planning isn’t the problem. Rather, our expectations around planning are.
In the words of the meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, “a plan is just a thought”.
Yet we treat our plans like “a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, to bring it under our command.” We use plans to reduce our perceived uncertainty of the future.
Don’t get me wrong, planning is an essential tool for constructing a meaningful life.
But all a plan is (and could ever be) is a present moment statement of intent. An idea in your head around how things could unfold in the future—IF everything goes as expected.
Yet, we become married to our plans, and unconsciously shift from “this is how things could be” to “this is how things must be”. And this can cause a lot of unnecessary pain in our lives.
The Perils of Planning
“Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.” ― Allen Saunders
Over planning, or being rigid with your plans, mutes the serendipity of life and guarantees you’ll be in a constant struggle to make everything happen exactly as planned. It’s exhausting to try to force the world to be a certain way when, in actuality, you have little control.
We may have an idea of how we want the future to unfold, but those are simply thoughts we created in our head—almost guaranteed not to happen as we expect. (Or else we could predict the future... and would all be superheroes).
Yet, we hold on tight to our plans. As such, we often feel an acute discomfort when we realize that reality has entirely different plans and our perfect vision simply won’t happen.
Throughout my life, I always made these detailed plans for my ideal future and would fall in love with them. But then things would take a complete left turn, and I would struggle to cope with it.
But who am I to dictate how the future should unfold? What do I know?
And who says we even want our current plans for the future to come to fruition?
If I found a magic genie 3 years ago that guaranteed my plans would come true, I’d currently be stuck on a life path I no longer want.
Sometimes life knows better.
Accepting our Lack of Control
“I don’t know where I’m going, but I know exactly how to get there.”
― Renias Matanjana Jampatchas Mhlongo (African animal tracker)
Then, why do we continue to expect our plans to remain perfect and intact? Well, it’s a harsh truth to come to grips with: that we have much less control than we’d like to have over the happenings in our lives.
That’s not to say one should take a passive approach to life. Our future is certainly in our hands. But, it’s also in the hands of a billion chain reactions in your environment that dictate how your future unravels.
There’s a certain innate beauty in accepting you have little control over the future... but still trusting that life is good and things will work out. Even if you don’t know how they will work out.
If you look back at your life, think of how some of the best, most beautiful moments couldn’t have been planned at all?
So... What’s the Point?
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” ― Dwight D. Eisenhower
“The wise man is like a tree that bends instead of breaking in the wind, or water the flows around obstacles in its path.” ― Tao Te Ching
A plan is an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future.
The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.
Make plans but build in flexibility. Expect things to go wrong (good old Murphy's law). Prepare to take detours in stride. Life is uncertain and s**t will certainly hit the fan.
As the author David Schwartz says “successful people don’t worry about obstacles but expect them and handle them as they go.”
Leave yourself space to reinvent yourself and re-engineer your goals. Don’t put pressure on yourself to figure out your future today.
A common trend I’ve noticed in studying high performers is that very few of them had a plan. And if they did, the actual path that led them to their success was nothing like their plan. They were intelligent and hard-working, but opportunistic. They made the most out of each moment and figured it out as they went.
Take some pressure off of yourself. We’re all figuring life out. Everyone's winging it.
Things will work out. I promise.
🙂My favourite things from this week:
Podcast: Tim Ferriss Show: Boyd Varty — The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life (#571) (Spotify, YouTube)
Book: Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman (Goodreads, Amazon)
Film: Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye West Trilogy (Netflix)
That’s all for this week’s edition of “saturday mornings”.
As always, if you have any feedback or thoughts, I’d love to hear from you.
Reply to this email, leave a comment or find me on Twitter @tommy_dixon_
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Have a fantastic weekend.
Much love to you and yours,
Tommy