on planning

seldom do things go as we have planned them. i'll be there at half past nine, and by eleven o'clock i have yet to leave home. we'll go out for a coffee, we say, but then it starts raining. planning, however, is not useless, not at all. it allows us to imagine things as they should be. and as reality is uncertain and somewhat tricky (the bitch), it forces us to adapt and to improvise. therefore, planning is useful as a guideline - even if in the end, we have been forced to improvise so much that we've followed a totally different approach.