Being and Doing

I come back to this thought again and again as I wait, pretty helplessly, on the decision making of others:

The world seems to have been taken captive by the need for aims and objectives in everything. We can't do anything until we know what it is we are trying to achieve. A lot of the creative, intuitive, spontaneous work in our world however is not done in accordance with aims and objectives. We do something, then assess what we have achieved. In order to demonstrate our orderliness and administrative gifts we then explain what we have just done in terms approved by the world's strategists. This, we say, is what I was trying to achieve.

In one of his moments of Christian lucidity Bob Dylan said 'No-one does the right thing; they just do what they want and then they repent.'

You wouldn't easily make sense of this if you were, for instance, from a Buddhist background - indeed Zen planning may be an oxymoron.

If, like a significant minority of the population of this country I am more interested in being than doing then who cares about aims and objectives? My aim for the day/week/month/year is simply to be the person God intended me to be. Or, if I don't believe in God, be the person I feel I should be.

Maybe if we duplicated this practice we could save a lot of committee meetings.

In this the world's natural affiliators and introverted intuitives share common ground. Those who concentrate on people and feelings enjoy being (but with others) for its own sake. You go to the next person who needs your time or whose time you need.