The End of Planning as I Know It

Lisa asked me "What's next?" Perhaps a book?

The only honest answer I can give is: I don't know. Perhaps that is the only honest answer there ever was. Sure I have ideas but...

I don't know.

When I went to Thailand and Sri Lanka it was a pilgrimage into the unknown. An experiment that worked wondrously.

The problem was coming home, I lamented.

I came back exasperated that everyone was frenetically rushing around asking me what my plans were. In America I feel radically stupid saying, "I don't know." (But that's my deal that I felt judged.) I mean how clueless can you get?

"What your programme?" is among the top five questions I got in the conversational repertoire in Sri Lanka. Are you married? was number two. Usually the Sri Lankans ask  so they can help you with your schedule - arrange a ride for you, or share a contact. Many times my answer only spanned the next few hours. If even that.

"Are you going to Galle next week? The east coast?"

"I don't know," came comfortably to my lips.

"When are you leaving Khao Lak?"

"I don't know," was the song I sang.

There is a freedom when you move to a new city solo. I moved from Miami to Daytona Beach, then Daytona to Salt Lake City, then SLC to San Jose in my adult life. Each time it's a fresh clean slate that's not weighed down by your past or your history or the way things were. It's really liberating for a while.

That was what it was like traveling alone for two months - each and every day.

Sometimes the most interesting people I met were purely through serendipity. One minute I'm walking in an alley past banana shake vendors and dive shops and the next I'm racing to get under cover quickly from the afternoon deluge. That's how I bumped into Tom and Mama Dang, but that's another story.

Another time I'm having trouble hailing a ride back to Nang Thong beach in Khao Lak on my way back from the Tsunami Children's Foundation office. A seeming waste of time because it was after hours. I walk and walk and finally I walk past the Moken village and Rakdeaw beckons me over. Funny how Rakdeaw's food education curriculum, ideas about having the Moken children run a cafe, and TCF's culinary school vision fit together.

Neither meeting were in my day planner. That's how it was most of the time. Over and over and over.

The myth is if you stop planning for the future nothing gets done. I made plans but I wasn't a slave to them. As my teacher says, when we embrace "can't know", then we relax and become sensitive.

So then, what do you do? You do the next most obvious thing.

Traveling to a foreign country without a tour operator you are bombarded with decisions that aren't part of a routine life (that is unless you are nomad): what is the cheapest place to stay? how do you get to that town - bus, train, ferry, plane, hired car?  is that water safe to drink? can I trust that tuk-tuk driver's advice? is the distance walkable? where do I eat breakfast, lunch, dinner? is there cell phone coverage in that rural village? how can I find the right bus (may not be labelled in English) back to Galle? is it offensive to snap their photo? is it okay to wear this to the temple? should I bring a gift? is that pork in that curry? where can I exchange money? with all these electronics, will it rain today?

That was the easy part.

I also had to fill my days arranging to meet people well off the tourist track.

When you get to the place you're reporting, what is the first thing you do?

I usually show up in a town having made one appointment to see someone - say, a meatpacking worker, an academic, a union organizer. That person usually leads me to another, who leads me to another, and so on. I put a lot of faith in random conversations at bars. Once you show up in town there's a lot of serendipity involved. - Interview with Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, in The New New Journalism, by Robert S. Boynton

Serendipity is not akin to luck. I'd say it has more to do with being sensitive and open without expectations (aka conditioned limitations).

"You can feel something move. I call what moves instinct. Like a baby moves to its mother breast. It's basic, primal. This inward leaning has no assurances. No answer comes back. When the ego "knows", it will answer, "Yes honey this is the right way." Illusion is always explaining and justifying itself. But when you ask instinct, it never explains itself. It's a magical way to move. You get used to surfing the inner dictates of life." - Adyashanti, notes from talk on the innocent mind 12/3/05

I have so much more energy because I am not paralyzed by the overwhelming array of options before me. Planning a year-long itinerary consumed me, so I never went on the odyssey to the creative class centers of the world back in 2004 (one reason I started this blog over two years ago was to write about it).

Now each step opens up the path to the next obvious thing.

Which reminds me I had the flu when I attempted my first 50K trail race. (I had less sense back then!) The first ten miles, even the first fifteen miles passed by effortlessly.  Each mile after that I only made it through because my focus was arriving at the next aid station: "Then I'll see how I'm doing and decide whether to keep going or quit."

I have finished every ultamarathon since with that strategy. The finish line fifty miles away may seem so outrageously far and distant... yet the next footfall is entirely natural.

p.s. I recommend Bryon Katie's book, Loving What Is. It's not about decision-making per se although she touches on it in chapter 9 on core beliefs, but it's nigh impossible to be sensitive and open without getting past this stuff. Instinct seems to shut down with resistance to what is actually happening.

Comments

[Marilyn]

"Serendipity is not akin to luck. I'd say it has more to do with being sensitive and open without expectations"...well put. It brought to mind when I went to my grandmother's birthplace in Italy. It took some planning to get there (a train down from Switzerland, several buses, no Italian in my repertoire)...but once I stepped off the bus in her hometown I had no expectations. I had a camera and thought I'd just snap a few pictures for her, find some lunch and catch the return bus four hours later. But I started walking and something told me to go down a little side street. Suddenly I saw a cafe carrying her maiden name. Next thing I knew I was meeting family members I didn't even know lived there who put me up for three days over the cafe.

As for "I don't know"...looking back, the chapters of my life that have been the most fulfilling have always started out with an "I don't know." :)