Thou shalt not make plans

Imagination can at times be a double-edged sword and our society has long recognized the need to use it with caution. On the one hand, there are countless warnings against getting lost in speculations of the future, like the tale I mentioned about "The Milkmaid and Her Pail", but at the same time we hail visionary entrepreneurs as heroes of the present and the future. In fact, looking into the future is deeply ingrained in our mind, even before we learn to walk we already understand cause-and-effect relationship and not only get used to expecting the result whenever the trigger happens, but we also learn to take actions to achieve our goals. Initially, the prediction capabilities are limited to the most immediate future, but as we grow up and gain experience in our interactions with the world, the range of our actions expands and so do the available outcomes.

Photo: PIXNIO

However, the need to have a vision is not limited to the leaders of big companies, or even to the leaders of all companies. The English researcher Raymond Meredith Belbin argues that every team, to be successful, requires someone to play the role of a visionary (what he called "Plants", because one should be planted on every team), someone who is able to bring fresh ideas without much regard for the surrounding circumstances. To some extent, one might argue that, without new ideas there is no possibility of change; it does not matter how good you are at what you are doing, only new ideas will allow you to do it better or to do something completely different. The natural risk is focusing too much in the visionary role and neglect like, following Belbin's nomenclature, the Shaper, that will find a workable path to the vision that the Plant has provided, or the Completer Finisher, that ensures that the project reaches its final destination and does not stray halfway.

Unsurprisingly (or perhaps not so) this division of roles also happens inside our minds, as if a number of different people populated our head, each one with a different character, a little bit in the guise of the 2015 movie "Inside Out". An our personality determines the relative weights of each of the roles even if some of them rarely manage to take control: slackers, for instance, will have a hard time letting their inner Implementers grab the wheel and instead let their Resource Investigator check yet another Facebook page in case they find something of use.

However, there has been a common trend in the last three decades, particularly in the US, where sticking to your vision and throwing at it as much time and strength as you can afford (possibly neglecting other aspects of your life, like your family or your social circle). Over time this mindset has significantly eroded the mental well-being of a whole generation that has felt that they never had time to live in the present, and triggered the rise of the mindfulness movement: regardless of how busy and driven you are in moving your agenda ahead, you should save some time every day to reject all the speculations of cause and effect, all the plans, all the expectations, fears and hopes, and simply be in the moment you are. A classical example is as basic a eating a raisin, but not by gulping it down in two seconds, but instead trying to grasp it with all the five senses, inspecting it visually, feeling the skin and how it changes shape between your fingers, smelling its scent and later on savoring it slowly, chewing carefully, looking for changes in the texture before you swallow it, and even examining its aftertaste once it is gone. This exercise, that would hardly take longer than five or six minutes, if properly done, can take you mind away from the avalanche of the daily grind for a brief moment before you dive back into the gale of unmet appointments and unanswered emails.

However, what happens when a situation like the COVID-19 pandemic prevents you from making any plans at all? When the time horizon of any decision you make is limited to a two-week time period there is not much to hope for. Any long-term goal gets automatically replaced by the urgent need to survive yet another two weeks. My brother Jack, three years my junior and director of an entertainment venue employing more than 200 people says that he has been working in this way for more than eight months now and he has no prospects as to when the situation will change. It is, as Catherine Nixey wrote in a very interesting article in The Economist, as if the future had been cancelled.

And the problem with a cancelled future is double: it is hard enough to miss our cruises, family dinners, beach vacation, ski trips, but it is twice as bad to know that we cannot even plan them. Ms. Nixey explains the situation very vividly: the anticipation in the days and weeks coming up to an event it is an essential part of the enjoyment. Germans use the term Vorfreude to describe this delightful feeling that the selected date is getting nearer and nearer. However, the pandemic has robbed us of any chance of Vorfreude, we can only lookforward to geting out of bed again tomorrow, clenching our teeth through the day and hope that eventually the situation will get better. In these conditions mindfulness is more like a prison sentence and less like a relaxing time for meditation.

But in spite of the glum prospects not all is lost for mindfulness: there will always be tiny moments of wonder when you smell the coffee in the morning, or when the cat comes purring onto your lap, when you accidentally run into a TV show that you actually wanted to watch or when a friend unexpectedly calls you on the phone to catch up. None of this will be able to make up for the lost enjoyment of our never-completed plans, but it can still show us that, even in the dreariest situation one can find sparks of happiness. Have a nice evening.