making plans is important, even if they always change
In response to Heraclitus a Buddhist friend said:
“Yes, so we’d better not plan too much for our lives because the change might ruin all our plans”
To which, I responded:
NO!!!!!!!! That is not what Buddha meant! Actually I used to think the same thing for a very long time. I thought, how can we make plans about the FUTURE when Buddha says we should always be in the PRESENT moment? The key is that planning about the future is different than living in the future.Living in the future means living your life as if the future has already happened. Making a plan is something that happens right now in this moment.
Plans are a wonderful tool. We should use them. The Buddha used them. The eightfold path is a plan. We need plans to reach our goals, to reach nirvana. We just have to realize we will never get there the way we plan but we can get there eventually, but we will never ever get there at all if we don’t plan.
