No plans, just right

“The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” — Robert Burns

Robert Burns, being a keen observer of all manner of beast and fowl, I call a fellow horizontologist.  Because that’s what we do.

Look at the animals! They’ve got plans. Plans to make a nest or a dam or a killing.  But they don’t really make plans, do they? They seem to ” just do it” — hunting, eating, playing, sleeping, mating, raising a family — all the things people also try to do with varying levels of satisfaction.

Animals follow what some may call “instinct.”  To me, the animals are attuned to a natural order of things that is the realism of the universe, the physicality around them. Man has subjugated the material world, burying it beneath his ideas, concepts, laws, schemas, theories and speculations. Man can count the moons of Jupiter but he can’t smell what’s upriver.

The adventure will begin as soon as you get off the tour bus.  Plans, events, occasions, itineraries, target goals, quotas, percentages … we insist on planning and when there’s a plan, the adventure has to wait.

Some of you will go to a job every day and yet you do not plan to go.  Some of you will eat an English muffin with marmalade and butter spread on it and yet you do not plan this. Some of you will catch the train at the very last second.  That’s right.  There is no plan. You walk along as a confident animal going about the world’s business.  Enjoy the adventure.