I once knew a secretary who wrote the minutes of committee meetings in advance. Even if the meetings didn’t go the way he wanted, at least the record of them did. I feel a bit like that, writing my ‘diary’ early, so that I can start my holidays and still meet the editor’s deadline. Sometimes I think I would like to write my whole life’s story in advance. Life, however, like committees, has a habit of taking us in unexpected directions.
There is a strand of spiritual wisdom, which we find in most religions, that teaches us not to plan too much ahead, but take each day as it comes.
Carpe diem, says the Roman poet Horace; Seize the day. “Do not flatter yourself about tomorrow”, says the Book of Proverbs, “for you never know what a day will bring forth”.
“Do not be anxious about tomorrow”, says Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, “for tomorrow will be anxious for itself”.
Of course we have to plan and prepare as best we can for tomorrow.
But the point of this spiritual wisdom is that tomorrow may have plans of its own.
The wise person plans ahead, but is prepared for those plans to be stood upside down.
In the meantime, there is the present moment that we must make the most of.
Live this day as if it were thy last, wrote Thomas Ken in the 17th century.
From one point of view that sounds morbid. From another point of view, it’s good advice. When the playwright Dennis Potter knew he was dying in 1994, he gave a television interview. “Below my window the blossom is out in full now … I see it as the whitest, frothiest, blossomiest blossom that there could ever be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than ever they were, and more important than ever they were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous”.
That’s the wisdom of the person who knows the importance of the present moment. I would like to learn that wisdom one day. Or rather, I would like to learn it today.