Tag: plans

What Now Then Plan Man

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Life is full of lessons. Every day if we choose to look we would see them and one way or another learn something. This year for many has been a learning experience like no other, not more or less than other things but certainly unique. There is nobody who could have predicted what has happened and nobody who couldn’t have learnt at least something from it. The last twenty-four hours has thrown another spanner in my face, or even in the works, let’s call it both.

Strangely enough very little has actually changed. I am supposed to go out to Greece to do a little renovation work on someones boat mid-September. I was going to do a little sailing with a friend for the first week and then work for three. The three was the limit because I had tickets for a comedy show on the 15th October from an already postponed Jonathan Pie performance from April. Unfortunately in the last twenty-four hours all has changed. For family reasons my friend has cancelled the sailing and because of this virus the show has been postponed yet again, this time to May next year. Third time lucky? Perhaps it would be wise not to plan.

That’s it though really isn’t it. Some lessons sneak up on us but some we’re fully aware of as we step into and experience them. Without a doubt I’m fully aware of the futility of planning. I say futility because my track record of never sticking to my plans makes them pointless. One reason I never stick to them is not because I don’t do anything but is down to my acting on a whim as things happen. It makes me wonder if the planning is to create a safety net in my mind as well as allow me to escape and fantasise when life is not so interesting. Currently life is interesting in certain respects but with it being unfulfilling in others I can’t deny I don’t let my mind run sometimes.

This year has made planning anything a complete waste of time. Strangely enough I actually really enjoyed lockdown because I knew I had no options, I was trapped in one place and you can’t make plans when nothing can happen. Traditionally having no options would be a problem but perversely being aware of and being lucky enough to have many creates a different type of pressure and stress altogether. This disappeared and while lockdown brought up different problems, at least the one of options was a weight off my back. “Poor you” I hear you saying and you would be right as there are people trapped and miserable all around the world but stress and weight on you back is still stress and weight on your back.

Anyway, despite little really changing my plans have gone up in smoke once more and something else will happen. Interestingly something else always happens and we just make the most of it as it does. Think of this year and all the new things people have done for example. That’s the beauty of a flexible approach to life but somehow even when that is clearly the way we still manage waste so much time and energy living in little fantasies of what could happen or be happening. It really is so difficult living in the present moment. And to just give an example, I have barely even been present while writing this, the whole time has been spent fantasising about spending the winter diving and sailing in the Canary Islands. The first step to overcoming a problem is to acknowledge the existence of the problem. I have a problem.

Do We Plan Positively?

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

There is something incredibly satisfying about making plans. I have never fully worked it out but I suspect like I mentioned a couple of days ago it is all about taking ourselves out of the present and into some dream fantasy land. Perhaps this could be a slight continuation of the other piece although I’m lazy to reread it to check, but I’m sure it mentioned not being in the present and I remember something about happiness just being around the corner. In a way this then is exactly a continuation piece because plans are nothing more than imagining a future event we would like to happen which surely, unless there is a specific reason, is going to be the best possible version that could happen. When we plan do we imagine ourselves happy, I would have always thought everyone does but then I know from conversations or more precisely; slightly argumentative debates, that I misunderstand depression for example. When people suffer from depression, or specific types of depression, do they imagine a future event happening with either a negative outcome or them being unhappy in that future moment. If so there must be no escape.

For me I have always imagined myself positively, or at least I assume I have. Do I imagine I’m imagining myself positively but relatively I’m actually imagining neutrally. Relative to what though. What if I am just imagining myself neutrally and that is what I base every present moment against, does that make my life nothing more than neutral. What is the base level, the fantasy or the present reality as our skewered eyes view it. There are no answers for that right now but I am planning on observing my own thoughts and how I place them on a scale of success. What is the outcome of that, am I imagining myself succeeding in these observations or am I left confused and clueless at the end. If I’m honest I imagine myself somewhere around seventy percent successful, which is a little miserable considering it’s my own fantasy, although probably realistic. The pragmatism of old age.

Is that better though. To have a plan for some future event which you are in your mind being realistic about. Perhaps this is just something we work out through experience but then that also means I only aim for seventy percent success. Should I aim for one hundred percent and potentially be disappointed, or will that higher aim actually result in me getting eighty or even ninety percent success, not what I aimed for but higher than my so called ‘realistic’ but which is now looking like a defeatist target. And if the depressed person expects to fail but has a little success higher than they expected does that bring them positivity or do they just view that through the prism of depression. Does that prism create a failure in observations. In truth I do not know. And also in truth it appears I am going off tangent from my follow up about being present and making plans to loads of nonsense questions and getting confused about depression.

I was going to tell you all about my lovely plans for the summer and how they’re probably going to change because everyone is going to be in quarantine soon and all flights will be grounded. It was going to be on the futility of planning and it ends up being nothing more than escapism from the present but all I can do is leave you with what this was going to be and try and digest some of those confusing questions I asked myself. I can’t even remember what I was supposed to be observing now. Something about success rate and being realistic I think, well there’s no harm in dreaming.

Born Again

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

When people get into their thirties, like I am well into now, they discover new things and sometimes become mad and obsessed with them. In their twenties it doesn’t happen so much but thirties for sure I’ve seen people go crazy. The born again christians of whatever new hobby or life direction they take to fulfil that empty hole in their life. My lack of the focus and attention span required may just protect me from this. I’m currently reading a book on beekeeping and they’re incredible animals, from the nanny bees keeping the larvae at the perfect temperature, and I mean to one degree celsius, to the queen laying two thousand eggs a day to the language they use communicating about good sources of pollen like little stoners. They’re incredible and I want my own apiary, healthy nutritious raw honey, tasty alcoholic mead and the connection and bond with an actual hive of tens of thousand of bees. Will I become obsessed, well maybe we’ll see. It may just fall at the wayside like my plan to learn how to write code – I downloaded an app about a month ago – and making beer – I bought a brewing set about two months ago.

The problem with desiring doing too much is that we put so much effort into the excitement of the planning and dreaming that the actual doing becomes boring. The effort and hard work required to complete these fantasies doesn’t compare to how we have been imagining it in our excitable dreams. In the end we do nothing. Part of this then involves discipline and this seems to be the thing that has been lacking for me. Of course it suited me in my twenties having no discipline, who needs it when you’re just traveling around and having fun. This continued into my thirties but at thirty-four I think I may have to become a born again disciplinarian, or at least born again about the idea of it. If I ever have kids, poor little fuckers. This writing experiment is just that, an experiment but it is also an attempt at learning discipline and creating the habit required to not even notice the effort required to be disciplined. I have the physical discipline to write daily it appears, or at least do at the moment while my life is in one place and stable, but not always the discipline to write well or with effort. That will come, as much because it’ll be boring for myself to just dribble out inane nonsense. But what I am curious to see is whether this discipline can spread out and infect other parts of my life. The discipline to do yoga every morning, to do a little exercise, to eat well – these three things are starting to become necessary more each day as I start to feel the aches and pains of age. Maybe I’ll even make my beer and god forbid sit down long enough without procrastinating to find time to write an app.

Time is the master. While it may be infinite our moment within it certain isn’t. What has happened now in the past is done, it is over. It may have been great and full of experience but if we do not look forward we just become those grumpy old lonely travellers lost in their missed opportunities and repetitive stories. Today I drive to Cockermouth, the day after I probably come back, and the day after that, well thats anyones guess but I suspect it may be a good one.