Compost Happens -- and Who Knows What Might Grow

"Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.’ Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.’" James 4:13-15

It has, I recognize, always been an illusion -- the ability to look ahead and make plans -- but we have enjoyed doing it, nonetheless. Indeed, we have often remarked that the best part of our experiences is the anticipation of them. The savoriness of anticipation has been the impetus for planning vacations well in advance. We have chewed on the expectation, the advance reading and preparations; we have treasured the imaginary visualizations of what it will be like, what we will see, and what it will feel like to be us in the midst of those moments. Looking back, we haven't given much thought to vicissitudes; we have simply blocked out the dates, bought our tickets and dreamed our way towards the reality.

That eventual reality, however, is essential. Anticipation must eventually be met by consummation; absent that it is mere make-believe dreaming -- liking owning a yacht or flying to the moon or being a rock star.

There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Anticipation is the psychological foretaste of the feast to come; eventually sitting down at the table is a necessity.

Perhaps it is now our age, or more likely the unfolding, shifting circumstances around us, but those illusions of certainty are evaporating. Life incurs. Realities change. Emergencies, crises, necessities and obligations interrupt. Or, as the bumper sticker advertising a plant nursery in Austin, TX observed years ago: "compost happens." Indeed.

I don't like to think that I have become a crotchety, inflexible old man -- at this age or any other. I hate the thought that I can't adapt on the fly; innovate in the moment; or simply adjust as circumstances change. It is, I know, simply a kind of grief: sorrow at the death of the naive joy of anticipation. James understood that such an arrogance was nonsense from the beginning, but it has tasted so good.

Perhaps the plant nursery had it right, but in a way I didn't at first understand. Compost -- that loamy, nutrient rich muck that might smell bad at the moment -- is the very food of growing things. Perhaps what I ought to take in hand is less the grief over upended plans and more the possibilities that might sprout from their decay.

There is, after all, that whole business of being "fully present" in each moment to think about -- that we can't finally live either in the past or the future, but only in the present. When Jesus discouraged worry about tomorrow -- that it will bring worries of its own and today's trouble is enough for today -- he was just as well speaking about anticipation. I think it was John Lennon, that other erstwhile messiah figure, who once mused that "Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans."

Who knows the life that could, even in this compost of rotting plans, even now be growing? One thing's for sure: I won't really know until it's ready to be harvested. I'll not expend the energy on anticipating it.