Plans without a plan

This article is part of the July issue of TintaLibre. Readers who wish to subscribe to EL PAÍS in conjunction with TintaLibre can do so through this link . Existing subscribers should inquire about the offer by contacting [email protected] or calling 914 400 135.

I'm not sure whether making plans is an act of faith or arrogance. In any case, the idea of making plans for the summer (or for the fall, spring, winter, the year 2028, or the next decade) not only doesn't appeal to me, it seems overwhelming. Planning is "the process of setting goals and defining the actions necessary to achieve them." Can that really sound sexy, sensual, fascinating, desirable, coveted, tempting, suggestive? Can anyone really want to do that ? In the summer, in the winter, in the spring, in the fall, in the year 2028, or in the next decade?

I'm a journalist, and therefore I've heard the most diverse stories—lurid, happy, implausible, hyper-realistic—always trying to put aside my prejudices, trying to listen in a way that isn't moralistic or judgmental. However, in my "civilian" life, all of that fails, and I'm unable to avoid feeling wary of people who say that, after reflecting on how they want to continue their "career," or what the next step in the development of their "work" will be, they're going to make such and such decisions: move to Zurich, get a master's degree at university X, take a gap year, read all the French writers of the 19th and 20th centuries in a span of six months to apply for a scholarship in Paris.

An inflexible and extremely rigid part of me listens to these plans and imagines a person standing before an Excel spreadsheet assigning percentages, calculating advantages and disadvantages, adding and subtracting factors of convenience and possibilities. This excessive planning strikes me as, on the one hand, the child of excessive optimism—any plan can be derailed in a second—and, on the other, related to a thirst for control, which, in turn, belongs to the family tree of bureaucratic lives. As I said: pure prejudice. Anyway, that's not how I work. Of course, to say that I don't work that way when, at the same time, I'm a person who now, in the month of June, knows exactly which countries, cities, hotels, festivals, or bookstores I'll be in the first week of July, the last week of September, the second week of November, and the entire month of April of next year, is a contradiction in terms.

It's hard to explain. I'm methodical and organized because to write I need isolation and continuity, an orderly routine, a rhythm that's the opposite of chaos. I know I have to deliver a column every Thursday, that I have to teach classes every Monday and Wednesday, I meet the deadlines I commit to, I run for an hour a day unless I'm on a plane or it's raining heavily or I'm feeling ill. However, just as I know with certainty that I can only do what I do by maintaining strict organization, I don't make long-term plans. I'm all about short-term planning, planning in small steps. The long-term plan appears to me like a tombstone over ideas that are more interesting to me, that fill me with greed and excitement: the possibility of the unexpected, the collision with discovery, the risk of taking that fork in the road that until recently didn't exist, the joyful danger of moving toward, without really knowing where .

The idea of a "plan" attracts words like discipline, organization, rigor, method. These are words that are fine in everyday life, that put a border on the fearsome ocean of shoreless space and time. But planning for the future, even if it means reading the complete works of an author, watching all of Bergman's films, or making a list of resolutions for the summer—or winter, or spring—is the equivalent of a paved, predictable, and, worse still, self-imposed future. When I was a child, I wondered very seriously where desire comes from and what it is. How do I know, I wondered, that I want to eat noodles and not meat? How do I know I want to put together a puzzle and not play with toy soldiers? It was a profound question, a question about desire. I suppose my reluctance toward long-term plans has to do with the fact that they go hand in hand with desire. What if I make a plan and, when the time comes, I don't feel like carrying it out? How do I know what my future self will want? Why tie a noose around my neck that tugs at me, committing to something that I might not even care about in the future?

I'm methodical and almost conventual with my work, but I don't have a strategy. I don't think about things like, for example, what my next book will be about. I don't even know if there will be a next book. My life is a mystery to myself. The closest thing to a plan has been my continued nomadism, my absence, and, lately, the eradication of mental rumination to sustain only one question—how does it go on, how does it go on—without finding an answer and without wanting to find one.

My reluctance, my profound rejection of using potential verbs, comes from somewhere: would have to, would have to, should. When faced with the phrase "The weather stripping on this door needs replacing," I run to the hardware store to buy new ones. I tend toward action rather than planning; toward doing rather than saying "I should do."

In the short term, I seem to operate in a rigid and planned manner: if I haven't planned a trip to the movies the day before, if I haven't planned since Thursday that I'll go out to dinner or have a drink on Saturday night, I'm unlikely to do it. But the long term is a continuous "we'll see," a "who knows." Perhaps because I know that all plans can be ruined, and there's the COVID-19 pandemic , which, among other things, ruined my 2020 vacation when, instead of traveling along the coast of France, I was locked away in my apartment in Buenos Aires working sixteen hours a day.

But also because I know that, at some point, chance plants its flower.

At 14, 15, 16, 17, I wrote fiction. I wanted to be a writer, and I assumed I'd write novels or short stories. But suddenly, I became a journalist thanks to an editor who gave me a job in the most interesting newsroom in Buenos Aires, and from then on, I never wanted to write anything other than true stories. There was no plan: it just happened.

In the winter of 1998 or 1999 , my partner was in New York, buying camera equipment. We were going to spend the summer in Brazil, and I was waiting in Buenos Aires for him to return to finalize the purchase of our tickets. He was staying in one of those cheap YMCA hostels, sharing a room with a globetrotting Australian who didn't speak Spanish, and he, in turn, barely spoke English, but somehow made him understand that he was going on vacation to Brazil. The Australian shook his head, pointed to a world map on the wall, put a finger on Indonesia, kissed the tips of his fingers to indicate it was paradise, and said the magic words: " Very chip ." My partner returned to Buenos Aires with that information: Indonesia, paradise, very chip. I didn't even know where Indonesia was, but two months later we were in Yogyakarta with a thousand dollars each and only the return tickets to Argentina. Everything else was improvised: if someone told us about a beach in Bali, we went there; If a stranger in a bar said Ubud, if another in a hotel said Lombok, if a guy at a beach bar said, "You have to see Manado," there we went. Following the trail of desire, letting ourselves be pushed by desire, going adrift and anchorless, wherever the blazing wind of improvisation takes us. Without a map, without a destination. Pure life pulsing in the emptiness of the absence of plans.

Making "summer plans" is like throwing the aggressive acid of a project subject to success or failure onto the delicate skin of a season that vibrates with the excitement of lightness and levity. My only plan for what we call summer, which for me is any place in the world where the temperature exceeds 27 degrees and it's not in the middle of the rainy season, is an eternal return to the only possible summer: the summer of childhood, which, more than a season of the year, was something described with one word: freedom. What was the plan for summer back then? None, or just one: not going to school for three months. What were those months filled with? Galloping after the herd of tumultuous desire. Roller skates or bikes, games at home or at friends' houses or at grandma's house, pool at the club or horseback riding, fishing or going to the movies, sleeping at home or at friends' houses, having a snack at home or going out for ice cream downtown, having dinner in the dining room or at the patio table, watering the plants or making a dirt track for the cars?

The only real summer, the one that lives in my heart, is the summer that isn't thought about or planned. A period I throw myself into with an empty head, ready to be away from the world for however long it lasts, as if there were no tomorrow. The celebration of a time that isn't listed on the stock market, sold in installments, or bought with a credit card. That is the only plan for the perfect summer: the invincible time of freedom.