MARTIN has been struck down with a flu bug, but has still man- aged to contribute to his regular column. It must be down to good planning, surely?
I HAD planned to write this column last week (sorry, Scott) but then I was struck by one evil flu bug. And this wasn’t the ‘man flu’ variety that women love to gloat about, coming in somewhere just along from ‘quite a bad cold’ on the sniffles/pneumonia spectrum. This was one mean package: non-gender-specific (ask my wife – she’s boldly picked up the heavily infected baton now I’m on the mend), it rendered me horizontal, groaning and useless for a couple of days – and even now I’m still feeling a bit dodgy so apologies for any random flights of delirium. Or any more than usual. In fact I had planned to write it even before Mr Flu dropped in (even bigger apologies, Scott), but then the ever-giving Mother Nature decided we really needed a few days of extraordinarily (for the time of year) wet weather, which conveniently highlighted a few leaks in our chicken houses, so it was away with the laptop and out with the roofing felt and nails. That’s the thing about plans: you’ve got to make them, but you’ve also got to make them flexible because life’s rich tapestry includes more than a few pulled stitches of unpredictability and occasionally a random tear (that’s ‘tear’ as in rip, but you can be sure there’ll be tears as in sobs along the way too). So what’s the point of making plans if life’s going to rip them up and cast them to the breeze like so much confetti? Well, as free-spirited as you might be, or like to think you are, life is just such hard work without a little structure; a list or two of organisation; maybe a few diary entries of order. If I’d put any proper planning into writing this, I might have checked if I’d mentioned my Runnerbean theory here before, but I don’t usually make many (ie any) notes before I start, so let’s just go with it and if you’ve read it before, that’s fine because it bears repeating… Some years back, I ran a series of workshops with Maggie Kay (check out www.maggiekaywisdom. com for all manner of wellbeing, wisdom and wonder) called Mind Your Own Business, the intention of which was to help therapists and creatives to make more of a living from their work. The workshop content included some lovely creative stuff like manifesting, along with some gritty things like admin. Generally it was well-received but it was the mention of planning and structure that rang the loudest alarm bells among the attendees. Most of them were working for themselves precisely because they didn’t want the structure and rigidity of a 9-5. But (and I know I have written about this before because it’s something of a pet subject of mine), with planning (and, ironically, even some limits) comes a certain freedom. We suggested that structure in business, and in life generally, be seen not as prison bars of limitation but rather as a structure of support – like a framework on which runner beans can climb. The beansticks allow them to climb higher and stronger. And also means they can grow away from the structure, explore other areas (perhaps getting annoyingly tangled round neighbouring plants) – and still have a safe, sturdy base to return to. In its most basic form, a simple list of ‘things to do’ ensures we don’t forget stuff. The next step might be to prioritise things; maybe then create separate lists. You might prefer to keep it on paper or maybe you have mastered the secrets of the spreadsheet. Getting it down on paper or screen also means you don’t have to try to hold it in your head: it’s there anytime you need to check how things are going, but it frees up your mind for actually doing things. Like making the list a little shorter. Or adding to it. What worried our workshop attendees, of course, was that if they got all organised, it might be at the cost of spontaneity – that fluid, unpredictable element of life that produces the unexpected. The surprise catalyst that allows the creative to burst forth. And that puts us on another spectrum, with ‘structure’ at one end and ‘free-form’ at the other. As always, we position ourselves wherever we feel most comfortable – although not everyone we interact with will be comfortable with our decision. But then they can always change their plans to accommodate us…