(Mis)managing Time

  After my short trip to the gym tonight, I recalled how I had finished work relatively late, late enough that I could not even sit down to have a real dinner. There are times in my life when things just get to be like that, and this evening was hard to wrap up. I have felt that there are many changes happening with testing new programs at work. Lately, I have been telling myself not to resist the pressure to accept all these new developments.  "Resisting" change sometimes takes the subtle forms of wanting things to be neatly in place, rather than being open to sudden or spontaneous changes in the schedule of things. I am practicing trying to relax into the situation itself to see what key things it is trying to tell me, rather than seeing it as an obstacle to some other goal. And of course, it's not easy, since it is quite natural to plan for specific outcomes, as this is the way society is also structured. Without a sense of structure, it would be difficult to meet deadlines or even get to work in the morning.
    What sense does flexibility have in terms of prioritizing life? If a person is 'too flexible', does she or he run the danger of losing their sense of what's important to them? I find that these are questions I think about recently. Many books in the Buddhist tradition (or 'mindfulness') tend to couch the problem as 'living in the now' as opposed to trying to live in an imagined future or past. But I don't think that it means that people should not make plans. When I am aware that plans are conditioned according to the changing circumstances, my planning can be done differently. It does not need to be that I get rid of plans just because everything is impermanent. Rather, I can keep the broad orientation of what I want to do and include the new things that arise. I think the analogy might be that of a fluid organism that is expanding to take in new things. If you ever watch an amoeba in a microscope (or at least in a picture), you might have seen this idea of a simple organism that is always expanding to include new things, without losing its structural integrity. If an organism has no such integration, it wouldn't survive at all: there would simply be no way for such an organism to keep itself intact. But on the other hand, if the organism remains rigid and impermeable, it simply could not eat or interact with the environment to survive.
    Writing is a good example of a practice that involves a balance between structure and flexibility. "Pushing" oneself to write or have "something to say" can be detrimental to creativity, because it just creates a lot of tension around something that is quite natural, like speaking. But if I go to the other extreme and say that writing should have no structure, I will soon end up not even finishing articles or paragraphs, since I no longer have the driving force to motivate me to go. So the flexibility part ends up serving specific functions, and it takes faith to know that we can already steer in the right direction without pre-conceiving how we should live or do things.