I received an email today letting me know that a friend had just passed away after complications arose during her surgery last week.   She was part of the community of friends Yvette and I have made after we bought our home in France and while we were not intimate; she was always someone I looked forward to seeing.   She will be greatly missed.

I was set on the path of buying that home in France after a business lunch about four years ago.  There was nothing remarkable or unusual about the lunch, the company or the circumstances – but after a conversation about travel, I realized in an instant that I no longer lived  life with spontaneity or adventure.   Rather, I lived a life of plans… long term plans stretching years into the future and centered on career, financial stability and one-week vacations.   These are all worthy things but they aren’t the only things worth consideration when living a life.

We get lost in our planning; thinking that we can control the future if we can just find the right method – be it the Atkins diet or Six Sigma.  Of course this is folly.  There are too many unknown unknowns that evade the best of plans.  In that battle for the future we often lose the present, timeless joys that are almost always near at hand – a well-cooked meal, conversation with friends, a quiet, lazy afternoon with a book.

We also labor hard without really knowing why.   Our work life increasingly consumes our attention and, like ants working on a project whose outer precincts we cannot conceive, we toil for some obscure institutional good that isn’t personally gratifying and that takes us away from the immediacy of life.

So with that jolt that only a death seems to initiate, I am recommitting to planning my life in months – not years; and to finding the good things near-at-hand.