Come Hector, come; go back

Thy wife hath dream’d, thy mother hath had visions;

Cassandra doth foresee, and I myself

Am like a prophet suddenly enrapt,

To tell thee that this day is ominous.

— Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida V, 1

This day is ominous, and who knows what the days in the future will bring? We as humans have a history of planning ahead, preparing for the future, and yet we do so with blind faith and hope, for nothing is guaranteed.

The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. No matter how carefully a project is planned, something may still go wrong with it. That saying is adapted from a line in the play To a Mouse, by Robert Burns. “The Best Laid Schemes o’ mice an’ men/gang aft a–gley.” You can detect the Scottish lilt in the phrase.

But we in Jamaica have our own phrase too, “Man mek plans and God wipe them out.” Nothing in the future is promised to anyone, nothing is guaranteed. This can range from a simple thing such as planning an event and rain falls and washes it out, to making arrangements for a huge soiree and sickness takes you.

Sporting events often fall prey to the vagaries of the weather. “Oh my, the match wash out again.” Cricket lovers are used to this by now, but at least those events can be rescheduled, postponed for another day, or contingency plans can be made. Enter plan B.

Or it can be of something of an even more personal scale, such as a wedding where rain again comes and washes it out or the bride fails to show up. Emotions now come into play.

The best laid plans, that’s my plan today, right after my spiel on ‘Love in the time of corona’.

Hi Teerob,

Your take on ‘Love in the time of corona’ was very special. So much so that I’ve circulated it to my friends all over the Internet. I can wryly say that it’s gone viral. But you touched on so many points, one being that in spite of all the uncertainty and distress, there is still time for love. Also, there are people who will find it exceedingly difficult to find love at this time. And even more profoundly, you said that after all this has passed, people will simply go back to their awful ways. Thank you, brother, for bringing some levity in these trying times.

Gregory

Hi Tony,

This too shall pass and mankind will continue to exist. This is not the first plague, and neither will it be the last. Lockdown and quarantine are biblical. “My people, go into your rooms and shut your doors behind you for a short time until God’s anger is finished,” Isaiah 26:20. As you pointed out, great plagues have killed millions in the past, with the Spanish Flu of 1918 claiming between 80 and 100 million people. It’s a cycle.

Sharon

Man makes plans and God makes other plans is yet another Jamaican saying. This, like the others, smacks of the frailty and fragility of our hopes and dreams, as we plan but can do nothing but hope for the best.

And even when we are meticulous, crossing every T and dotting every I, things still often go wrong. There is the saying, ‘The fog of war,’ used by the military to highlight that even after all the military planning has been done, nothing is certain to go as planned when the bombs start exploding and the bullets start flying.

People in boxing used to say that about anyone who fought Mike Tyson back in the day. “No matter how you train and plan for him, after his first punch lands, all your plans fly through the window.”

But plan we must, for we cannot live without hopes and dreams for the future. Even animals prepare for the winter as squirrels in ‘foreign’ store nuts, ants stockpile food, and bees make honey. They have a plan, and so should we.

With the onset of the coronavirus, many plans have been shattered. Little did we know a few months ago as we celebrated Christmas, New Year, and Valentine’s Day, that a few weeks down the line we would all be falling prey to something that we can’t even see.

It came like a thief in the night and in one fell swoop wiped out the plans of the entire world. Here in our small corner the first big blow was the cancellation of Boys’ and Girls’ Champs. This was only the second time in the history of Champs that it has been cancelled, with the first being in 1944 due to World War II.

That’s one huge plan, the best laid plans of men and women erased, just like that. Thousands of athletes had been training for months, making great sacrifices, some with the hope of garnering scholarships to foreign universities. All those plans gone, just like that.

Then there was the Penn Relays, also like Champs, over 100 years old, cancelled, because of this accursed virus. So many plans were made, so many hopes and dreams erased. When I first heard that Champs was being cancelled, I was shattered, worse how KC was more than tipped to win with over 400 points. But when I watched the replay of last year’s Champs courtesy of TVJ‘s sports channel and was visually reminded of the magnitude of the crowd, I knew that the right decision was taken.

Maybe if this virus wanes and disappears in a few months they can reschedule, even without spectators present. But that’s another best laid plan, huh? Another great event that eclipsed all others in sports, the Olympics, was postponed for a year. Again, the best laid plans of men, erased. The Olympics takes place every four years and was only cancelled during world wars I and II.

This time it has been postponed until July next year, disappointing some athletes yes, but giving others more time to recover from injuries and prepare even more. It’s not easy, though, for athletes train according to a schedule and plan to reach their optimum, ‘peak,’ at a certain time.

Now those activities have to be rescheduled as they go back to the drawing board. But is so it guh, is so de system set, and we just have to work with the bigger programme. Nothing is written in stone, and sometimes even when you plan to chronicle your plans, the stone shatters. A bitter irony.

All the great sporting leagues around the world have been halted. Football, baseball, basketball, hockey, swimming, American football and more, all erased from the blueprint of our lives. Billions of dollars lost. But as they say, it’s only money. The joy that sports brings is worth so much more. Oh, how I miss sports.

But it’s not all about sports; other plans have been made that have gone to naught. Large funerals were planned, only to be attended by a chosen few. Weddings also were affected, which we all know take a lot of planning and even have a designated person, the wedding planner, coordinating the whole event. Many have been reduced in size or cancelled.

I know of this couple, planning a huge wedding of over 200 guests this summer, now have to either postpone or scale down. Still, when plans change, it’s not always bad, for other opportunities can arise, dark cloud, silver lining and all that. For example, a smaller, simpler wedding will be much cheaper, and a scaled down funeral will save people spending so much on liquor and food to impress ‘mourners’.

When plans are disrupted it can be most disappointing and hurt to the core. It can affect financially too, as that planned project or job is no more, and income suffers. It can be hard on people. No jobs coming in, no tips to get from customers, no event planning, no functions to prepare.

But where there’s a will, there’s a way, and where there is life, there is hope, and as wise persons said, “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.”

“In the planning stage of a book, don’t plan the ending.” There’s also another one that goes, “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations if you live near him.”

We are all living through a tumultuous time in the world’s existence, my friends, and it’s new to all of us. But mankind will survive. Our only hope is that we can learn collectively from this terrible lesson that we do not run this planet, but nature does, and whatever plans that you may make, the best laid plans can oft go awry.

More time.

seido1yard@gmail.com

Footnote: There’s an old Greek saying, “Even the gods despair when faced with stupidity.” Even as the world is gripped in the coils of this crisis, stupidity still reigns supreme. Many people will cause the demise of others and themselves simply by being stupid. Although the virus is extremely contagious and people are advised to keep a distance to stop the spread, they still stupidly defy the warnings, even posting their stupidity on social media. Why have a pool party at this time? Why keep a church service or choir practice in a small space? This happens in foreign too, for stupidity is universal. That’s why in some countries the police beat those stupid idiots with canes. I guess our human rights advocates would frown on that practice. Stupid is as stupid does.