“The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men,
Robert Burns
Gang aft agley.”
Some things in life never seem to go to plan.
So many of our decisions are based on things that we think are going to happen, but then Life gets in the way and everything changes.
Like the best athletes, we have to be agile. We have to be able to change direction quickly. We have to be certain of uncertainty.
A lesson from the Lords
Last week both houses of the British Parliament debated the Syria crisis and what the United Kingdom’s response should be. We all know how that went.
I was struck by a speech by Paddy Ashdown, the Liberal Democrat peer and former leader of the party, who provided a distillation of why we should confronting Life’s whims:
Of course there are uncertainties. You cannot take actions without having uncertainties… Every action that you take has consequences. Some of those consequences are predictable, some of them are rationally likely, some you do not know.
You cannot tell exactly what is going to happen. You cannot have certainty in this, you have to have judgment.
But if you want certainty you can have it:
Take no action.
Lord Ashdown
We must all recognise that the path of least resistance is also the path that leads us nowhere.
Take no action
By committing to nothing, by never forming plans, by refusing to look to the future – all because we can’t predict what might happen – we are deny ourselves the chance to achieve anything.
After my transplant I fought hard against planning.
For two-and-a-half years I’d lived my life month-to-month, then week-to-week and, towards the end, even day-to-day, unable to plan for a future that may not be there.
In February of 2008, three months post-op, I booked a holiday to the north of England for my birthday in May – the longest planning I’d allowed myself for years – and missed out while my friends had fun after being admitted to hospital with an infection.
After the acceptance that I was still not “normal” and recovery continued, I stopped planning. I stopped wanting to look to the future lest my dreams were thrown back in my face again.
I simply couldn’t handle living in uncertainty. I was frozen by it.
Only after listening to Lord Ashdown did I realise that the reason I’ve felt like I was failing recently was because I was taking no action.
But refusing to plan because of the uncertainty wasn’t just preventing me from living life to its fullest, it didn’t actually take away any of life’s uncertainties – they were still there, still just as likely to happen, still just as hard to pin down.
Get something done
No matter how scared we are, how much we don’t want to think ahead, to dream of a future because it may never be, we have to take action.
We have to get off our arses and do something.
We don’t even have to plan it; doing something is better than planning anyway. We can get lost in planning, deluding ourselves that to plan is to act, when it’s really just a form of preventative action.
If there is something you want to do stop reading this and go take the first step. (Or maybe Tweet it first…)
Taking no action achieves only the certainty that nothing will happen and nothing will change.
The best laid schemes of mice and men may indeed aft gang agley, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all be dreamers and schemers.