When you make a plan, how do you do it? (literally?)
For most of us, the act of planning involves some form of taking what is inside our mind and putting it somewhere external, whether that is on a calendar, in Notion, in a notebook, or on the back of a napkin. That act of externalization turns out to be indicative of the roots of the word. ‘To plan’ comes from the French Plan, “ground plot of a building, map”, in turn from the Latin planus “level, flat,” which comes from the PIE root *pele, “flat, to spread.” It wasn’t until the 1700s that we have the use of plan as a verb, in the sense of “make a plan of, put on paper the parts, dimensions, and methods of construction of.”
For many, myself included, the act of planning can be a deeply relaxing and therapeutic act. It is a way of containing the unknowable future, of extending out the present as though we can really control or direct what happens next. And to a certain extent, we can; on the one hand, to think that by making a plan it will inevitably happen is foolish, but on the other hand, we all know that the likelihood of something occurring if we do make a plan for it is much higher. And so we plan. We plan out of fear and anxiety, and also in hope. We plan, often, because it feels good, because by making our thoughts external we actually see them and learn ourselves in a deeper way.
It is this making external, embedded in the roots of the word, that I want to focus on today. If we go all the way back to the Proto-Indo European root *pele, we get the sense of “flat” or “to spread.” The focus here seems to be on a near two dimensionality–to take something with bumps and ridges, something with material body, and spread it, thin it to the point of flatness. I love this as a verbal image for our process of taking interior life and putting it into a plan. Who we are and what we feel in the present (let alone in our relationship to the future) should absolutely be characterized as three dimensional; a whirling, ridged, luminous body of emotion and thought. To plan is to extract this, smooth it down, and try to form it to spread flat over the surface of our life. It makes sense that the root of the word evolves to mean ‘map’ in French. Maps are both ‘real’ and the ‘not real’ that attempt to prepare us for the real. They are signifiers, tools, reflections.
It is this tension between ‘reality’ and pointing at reality that make plans so subject to change. In one instant, they way we lay out our day or week or year can be entirely subject to our emotional and mental state in that instant: perhaps we are feeling calm and in love with our calm, and build a plan that incorporates daily meditation and that three day silent retreat we have been saying we’d do for years. Perhaps we are brimming with energy, sore from yesterday’s workout, and just listened to a podcast about productivity that has us motivated to turn our life into a machine, to account for every second of it in 15 minute blocks. These plans are all projections, the two dimensional shadow cast by the ever-changing shape of our interior life. This is not to say that they aren’t useful–they are–but simply to give grace to the fact that they change, that of course they change.
A useful tool for self interrogation, then, might be to notice when we are drawn to plan, and in what capacity. What state are we in, and what state do we seek to be in as a by product of planning? Who is the swirling cloud of self today, and who does it imagine it will be in future, if you could only press it flat, work out the kinks and wrinkles?