no plans

Maybe I just saw myself swimming in this crazy, desperate, horny, existential, urban, greedhead-frenzy sea of random bodies…

Chaos can be a positive thing. Chaos is inherently part of the creative act. To embrace creativity means you must also embrace chaos. Things don’t happen when everything is neat and “just so”. Creativity is all about distruption. The people who tell you that creativity is pain-free are liars. The people who tell you they’ve got a plan are liars. There is no plan. There’s just you, God and the need to invent. And this uncertain world is what most of us now find ourselves entering, willingly or otherwise.
Creativity equals chaos. Chaos equals creativity. Embrace it or die. I’ve already done so. I know all about it. It almost cost me my liver but like I said, education is expensive.
The Creative Age is upon us. The Chaotic Age is upon us. We are scared. Damn right, we should be scared. But out of the terror comes the amazing opportunities for us to expand both on the material and spiritual level. The fewer safety nets there are to save us, the less choice we have to be anything other than ourselves, the less choice we have besides doing what is meaningful to us. And finding ourselves, doing what matters, becoming the person we were born to be, this is what God put on this earth to do.

~ Hugh Macleod

I have been pondering Hugh’s anti-plan statements above and cross-checking them against my desperation of late to seriously work on THE PLAN. He has caused me to ask myself, “what if I don’t write a list detailing some arbitrary five year plan that will be obsolete the minute a new detail comes into the mix that I could not have foreseen because I did not even know it existed when I devised THE PLAN in the first place? What if I just reduce this urge to its most minimalist state: the foundation = uncovering what I want to do?”

The problem has always been that the discipline I love has a very narrow, visible job spectrum (as far as I know). And therein lies the problem for me…I just don’t know what “other” things anthropologists are doing besides the obvious: teaching, studying “others” and writing up the findings, working in corporations as pseudo counsellors or market place advisors, researching within governments (me), researching for “others” (me), NGOs…
It seems to me it is a matter of deduction as opposed to induction. I used to think I had to learn about every role an anthropologist has ever played/worked but now I think it is about knowing myself and then “creating” my niche. Reading Jay, Hugh, and the myriad other bloggers I have recently linked through to, I realise that it does not matter what you are passionate about doing; it is about knowing that passion and pursuing it everyday. No plans - because that everyday pursuit will open up the horizons, inform you, and lead the way.