He woke up that day with a brilliant idea. The window was right next to the bed, so he reached out his leg to move the curtain away and look outside. Piercing sunlight that forced its way in blinded him for a second. He quickly drew back the curtain to restore the osmotic balance of the room. Why was it sunny… The forecast hadn’t warned about the sun. He hadn’t calculated it into his schedule. He would have to start over, do the whole planning from scratch. Ohhh… He felt as if the floor was collapsing under his feet. Not to panic! He had come up with that good idea after all, so at least he could employ it now straight away.
He walked over to a desk and opened a small black planner. The whole day in a nutshell—now ruined because of the sun. There was no room for it in the schedule. He tore out the page and tossed it into a metal paper bin. But then his body tensed up and he quickly reached over to the bin, took out the crumpled sheet, and flattened it with the palm of his hand. Maybe he could simply introduce some adjustments, make it sun-proof… Why did everything have to always go wrong? There should be a way to properly organise one’s way through life. Optimise, prioritise, don’t leave any room for chance. But if future doesn’t exist, what does it mean to plan it? A plan is just a projection of the future in the current moment. Wishful thinking, a utopia. It has more significance for the present than for the future—feeds anxious minds with the illusion of control. Covers them with a warm blanket of agency, dispels the darkness of doubt.
Knock on the door. He freezes in the armchair. Don’t make any sounds. They will knock one more time and then give up. Wait it out. Another disturbance, the whole day is collapsing. He wasn’t expecting anyone, such violation of privacy. Three more knocks. He closes his eyes. Go away, go away… Sound of footsteps, gradually fading away. He slowly gets up and looks through the peephole.
Life could be presented in two plans: horizontal, and vertical. Horizontal would be all lived experiences, chronological, linear, proceeding forward without going back. Vertical— emotional, feelings that emerge, disappear, and reappear, and while the scenography on the horizontal plan changes, they remain the same at their core. You can only plan things happening on the horizontal axis, and only to a small extent, there is a significant amount of randomness calculated into it.
Before the nearby church bell chimes noon, he will have edited today’s schedule. Restore order in the chaos. He will have rewritten every item on the agenda so that it’s future-proof. He will have fixed this mess and earned some moments of calm bliss. And then by the end of the day he will have started over, and worked towards the triumph of the future over the present. Towards the new futurism.