Think in decades, act in days. Or so the saying goes, seemingly implying that we must play long-term game and take incremental steps every day to get to our goals.
It’s also said that planning is everything, plans are nothing. Which is to say that your plans may not materialize as designed, but it does not eliminate the need for planning. Planning lets you control the narrative of your work and your efforts even with a general directional compass. The end-goal is not in your hands and that’s why plans are by themselves just that, plans. It’s the age-old cliché from Gita – “karma kar, fal ki chinta mat kar” or focus on the work and not the fruits of your labor.
Richard Hamming in his excellent book “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering” points out that the best learning in science is achieved with a goal in mind, even though the goal itself becomes irrelevant when you progress. This goal is in fact a direction, a general tool acting as a compass. A compass does not state your destination, it merely points you in the right direction if you know the coordinates. The assumption is that these coordinates are variable but they are something instead of nothing. As you start moving towards these coordinates, you meet obstacles and opportunities along the way much as you would in back-country hiking. You may choose to ignore them, or you may choose to improvise as you move along aiming to follow where the path seems interesting but is still in the general direction you set out towards. Eventually, as these decisions branch out with possibilities you continue making decisions that take you further away from the straight line you drew from your starting point to the destination, while still continuing towards the same coordinates.
But you are like the water in the river, the river of life, never the same at any given bend. And you change as you absorb new information about your environment and about yourself. So does your understanding and your relation with this goal, this coordinates you started with. Eventually, there comes a moment of reckoning, a critical mass threshold when the weight of this new information is pressing on you, nudging you to look askance from your starting objective, and to a hidden hill that was not visible earlier, a hidden, magical hill that seems to hold the answer to the questions you have collected over the years.
There is this quote from Anne Dillard I keep going back to – “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives”. This wise adage touches upon the way in which we lead our days as we move towards the set coordinates. It focuses on our character and our mindset and our attitude towards this goal, this elusive destination, this path we have thought for ourselves. And it determines how – when we meet new information along the way – we respond. We can either stick to our path, blinkers in our eyes. Or we can steer off course because, heck, we can and we like it.
If hiking were a competitive sport, we would be walking briskly, even sprinting towards the top of the trail. But it’s not (I think) and so some choose to stop and smell the flowers. Others trod off the beaten path for a different, greater adventure. Yet others are content pausing somewhere along the way and turning back because they are content. Those who begin the hike, do so with the destination in mind. But while spatial destination may be the same, everyone reaches a different destination because they perceive it differently when they get there. Since the destination is not the same, there’s no point to competing because there’s no way to measure what the hikers accomplished on their hike. A crude way to measure would be to time the hike to measure physical fitness and proclaim a winner. Another crude way would be to test the recall about the various natural bounty they encountered along the way. There can be many more. But then, the obvious comment from the high priests of hiking would be, it’s not hiking anymore, isn’t it? Hiking is a game, an infinite game because you are playing it for yourself. It’s still a game though not something we commonly consider as a game because there is no end to it. It shifts shapes and form and revels at it.
We must spend our days then, by working towards a goal, a long-term goal. But it’s a game we are playing with ourselves and with no other. Further, there is no end to this game other than when our days come to an end in this world. And so, even as we mold our days to work toward this lofty, ambitious, decades-spanning goal, we must accept the fact that this goal is shifting and transforming as we work towards it.
They say constraints are good, and work wonders with your creativity. Forced constraints help us think outside the box and come up with something truly novel. Accepting a world where our goals are as liquid as they come frees us up from the bondages of set objectives but puts a constraint around us by questioning the very formulation of the goal. In a way, it constraints our imagination given the fuzziness that this acceptance begets.
Philosophers cloak this fuzziness in different terms, including absurdity.
“I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd, is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.”
Albert Camus
We seek clarity when there is none in our efforts at finding meaning of this life. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”.
Ted Lasso on Apple TV is an amazing watch and I think what works with the show is the light hearted way in which it approaches the incidents in the lives of its lead characters. The light heartedness comes from a clarity I suppose (from its creator I mean). I would like to believe it’s the clarity that comes from acceptance of absurdity. Lasso’s folksy approach to envy, jealousy, resentment, and emotional angst is heart-warming precisely because he sometimes hides, sometimes exposes it in his trademark jocular style, no?
Jargogled Impressions. 