It is good to plan. It is important to plan. It is only if you have a plan that you will go to where you want to go, or get what you are looking to have. There are many more iterations of the same philosophy. I don’t know if this is true. My case here is not to make a planned-out thesis on this. My interest is in examining the nuts and bolts of planning, what makes it so compelling, and how it happens to seem like what it appears to be held responsible for.

Many people are unable to see a little blank space for what it is. There was a refrigerator that my grandmother and I went to buy. There we saw a few pieces that were staid and serious. Some had a bunch of prints on it. A small conversation my grandmother and the salesman had was around the kind of people who willingly opt for this kind of a flower patched door for a refrigerator, to which the gentleman said that most are sold for looking filled up, exactly like the ones she was despising. The statement would go to apply on the nature of the mind. The mind is not a reality. It is a perceived reality for the truth of what this is, of who you are, as your mind. This may be over-simplistic, but my intention is to keep the technicality aside as a way to reflect my mind simply and clearly. When we plan, it is our need to perceive the reality of what is in this moment according to the comfort of what we know and feel welcome about. And because the mind is capable in its own right, differently and deliberately, it will yield to the extent it has been explored, tested, and busted!

To be able to hold the emptiness for its fullness, see the blank for its purity, and be hollow for its wholeness, is what the mind will feel restless, threatened, and powerless with, initially. The initial is a certain amount of time. And time too is of the nature of the mind. A mind can experience a few moments as a day, and also try to sleep through the night unsuccessfully as though it is forever. The way life happens is almost directly a consequence of the way we live within. The question only is the extent to which a statement like this will make sense, if looked strictly as a thought. The thoughts are always of things, of the physical manifestation. Which is why we can take this further to say that the thought itself is a subtle but physical thing. What is not physical cannot also, therefore, be a matter of thinking it up, like a plan.

There is no way of planning our way into uncharted territory. What is uncharted is almost everything that is yet to be. To chart a plan is to work with what is known, familiar, and conditioned. If one is truly keen on adventure, just have to keep adventuring with everything that is truly available here and now, then maybe plan the mundane as we like it. No plan can promise what can be at the end of it. Because each plan would be another thought, and thought would be of other things. No thought is worth anything when venturing into the pursuit of the void.

Yuvraj Goswami is the author of #NoPointTalking, available on Amazon in January 2019. Excerpts from the book can be found on www.elefemel.com