The subject we are going to discuss now is anticipation.
I can tell you a “secret”: I’m not bored. In moments when nothing happens, my brain works in anticipation; I think about everything that might happen in the course of the day or the next few weeks. Then “things” come up: for example, setting the dates of the meetings for 2022. This happens to me at times when I have nothing to do and I think about everything I can anticipate, including my personal life. I anticipate as much as I can; afterwards it happens by itself and I am calm and stress-free because I have anticipated.
Anticipating, is it using the energy of impatience wisely?
No, I don’t see it like that. It’s a creative work generated in moments when I have nothing to do, when I’m quiet: in front of the TV, when I’m walking in nature, before going to sleep or in the morning before getting up.
For me too, it has nothing to do with impatience. When you anticipate, you take into account the time factor, and also the unexpected things that may come up.
Yes, this is one of the advantages of anticipation, it leaves an extra margin for the unexpected. And we enter the dimension of intuition when we anticipate. Sometimes I have intuitions, thoughts that come out of nowhere and bring something new; that’s what I call creativity. I play the script virtually, anticipating the unfolding, and this is a realm that is incredibly conducive to creativity. O. does that too.
Yes, very much so. It materializes in my work: there are problems, no one realized it, and I’ve already corrected it. These are extraordinarily pleasant moments, it’s enjoyable.
That’s what I call intuition, because you can’t know when it’s going to happen.
Existential relaxation, anticipation and intuition, it’s the same thing for me.
Does that mean there is co-creation? Between personal intention and what life decides?
Indeed, it is part of the faculty of anticipation, as I described it in my book . Pre-sensory perception opens up the dimension of being able to anticipate things that normally cannot be anticipated. I have examples every day; I anticipate things and I don’t know if I’m creating them or if I’m connected to the flow of life, but I have glimpses of what’s going to happen. For me it remains a mystery; I can’t express it any more, I just see.
This summer, I spent a week on my couch, all alone. I had finally understood that I was powerless, and I wanted to experience: “If I don’t do anything, what happens? ». And nothing happened. The second I said, “Now move! “it all happened very quickly. I asked myself a lot about the fact that my life was in a dimension of intention to do. For me it’s not clear; when there’s boredom, necessarily I do. So I try to experience doing nothing when I’m bored: to feel the emptiness, to see what it feels like to simply be in existential relaxation. And I ask myself: are there moments when you do nothing and you are bored? Moments when nothing is happening, when you are, for example, in meditation?
For me there is always something going on. If nothing happens, there is at least: anticipation.
So there is always something.
Nothing produces no memories. I’m surely often enough in nothingness, but it leaves no trace, no memory. I am surely in moments of nothingness when I anticipate, otherwise I don’t see how I can have intuitions. I say that by deduction, because I can’t know. Nothingness is nothingness, it’s: nothing, no memories. You can’t spot it, if you spot it, it’s not nothingness. Most of the time, people don’t understand that.
It’s unaffordable by the mind.
How do you want to approach it? It’s unaffordable, period.
Boredom in itself doesn’t exist; to call a moment “boredom”, you have to build something.
There is a judgment, an expectation. And the dimension of time.
Time in nothingness does not exist.
When you’re waiting at the airport and have nothing to do, it’s time to anticipate. That’s when you can be creative, when you can have ideas that you wouldn’t have had if it wasn’t for the waiting time.
This is something I know very well: during my graduate studies, I walked every day to get to my school. Very often I would solve math problems that I had worked on for 2 hours without finding the solution. It often came up in those moments; just by walking, with the body moving, there is a kind of creativity that takes place; the left and right brain function differently. It’s not just about anticipation, it’s also about unblocking circuits. Now that I’m driving to work, I have a lot less creative time. I have the reflex to turn on the radio and I often think that it pollutes me. I get a lot of information and it prevents me from being in that place where thoughts are allowed to pass freely.
Listening to music.
Yes, if I listen to music instead of news, it makes me freer. But it’s also to say: this anticipation is sometimes a solution to problems that drag on and it’s not always planning. We’re on free connections.
It’s multidimensional, there is information that can come from the past, that we have stored in ourselves but that was not accessible, to solve a future problem.
It is giving space. It also happens in the shower, for example.
In the shower or in the bath, it’s great! In fact, most great ideas are born in those moments. In the shower, sometimes things happen to me… eureka.
Anything else about anticipation? For example, concerning the phone that wasn’t charged this morning, it would have required anticipation.
That I charge it before dinner, for example?
Absolutely. Short-term anticipation is in the coming hour, then for the day, for several days, several weeks, several months, several years; these are the different intervals to be considered when starting the anticipation.
Does this correspond to an inner gesture?
No, not at all. For example, there’s a project with the land nearby, the project stays within me, and during the moments when I have nothing to do, when I’m probably in nothingness, I think about different subjects that animate me and it develops by itself.
My goal is to pay off my debts as quickly as possible and in my current situation that’s not possible, so my goal is not a long-term goal, but as quickly as possible. For that, I need to generate an activity that allows me to do that. So the first step is to do the “si-do” of my current life, that is to say, conclude my work, change my housing… And everything is organized around this objective; for the last six months everything has been going according to my plan. I also had a plan B or C if things didn’t go well, but in fact it’s going better than I had hoped, because I’ve set a dynamic in motion.
It’s a special case, in the sense that you put an extra constraint on yourself.
Yes, it’s a time constraint, but without stress.
It’s important not to stress when you’re in retrospect. Another example: people who have set a deadline to pay off their debts and don’t know how to get there: it’s the fact that you set this goal retroactively and set in motion a creative process that makes it possible to get there. On the other hand, when you stay proactive, you never manage to repay.
The fact of starting from the objective and really wanting to reach it is important, it sets in motion a momentum, a dynamic and creativity comes with it.
And I add: life will help you, with new openings, new possibilities that you would never have thought of.
That’s providence.
Yes, that’s exactly right, it’s miraculous.
The important thing is to go all the way, otherwise it can’t work. But I would like to add that it is not a path lined with roses. I have sometimes been attacked by my basic belief: “You’re a good-for-nothing, you won’t make it, you’re attacking a mountain…. ». It’s a fight, but despite everything that identity has suggested to me, I stayed one hundred percent on my objective.
Absolutely.
On the other hand, I sometimes have problems anticipating the short term.
A suggestion for short-term anticipation: the night before you go to sleep or in the morning before you get up, go over everything that’s waiting for you.
I do it at home, I prepare my day, my week, but when there are many things, I have difficulty. Sometimes I don’t set goals and I’m less creative.
Maybe you don’t want to face a form of incompetence?
It’s a kind of arrogance, then.
Yes, when you know how to do it, there’s no need to worry about anticipating .
The big difference that I observe compared to before is that there is a great relaxation in you.
On a certain level, I am no longer the same. I’m still a beginner, but not like 15 years ago, when there was confusion, doubt and I couldn’t decide what to do or not to do. Now I have a global vision, and I see the lie in front of me when it arises.
If all day long we keep in mind what we have to do, all we have to do is anticipate. That’s what the intellectual center is for: planning and anticipating. When you’re not busy with anything else, or if you’re busy with something not too difficult, you can anticipate: what am I going to do when I finish this, how am I going to do it? For me, it’s automatic; when I get out of my office, I’ve already prepared my return, I make my life easier. When I come back to the office, I can start right away because I’ve already cleaned my glasses, I’ve already prepared a glass of water and I’m at peace. Anticipating makes life more fluid; I spend half of my day anticipating, tidying up, planning, that’s my main occupation and I think everyone should do that. For me, getting as organized as possible is part of real life. Of course, there are unforeseen events that require another strategy, such as reorganizing priorities very quickly.
It reminds me of the false freedom we were talking about in May ’68: “We’ll see! ». And to seem cool, I worked a lot on this model, that of not anticipating. But it was to appear, because I didn’t know how to anticipate.
In the kitchen, I would tend to take action right away, without thinking about preparing all the ingredients and utensils, for example taking an extra bowl to put the peelings in. In fact, it’s a tendency to stick to the action.
When you don’t anticipate, you have no choice but to do it like this. When I prepare my meals, and I have to take the ingredients out of the freezer, I already have to think in the morning at the latest about what I want to eat in the evening; I go to the kitchen around 4 p.m. to prepare everything, including taking the plates out, putting the pan on the stove. When I go upstairs to eat, all I have to do is reheat or cook. It’s natural to do it that way.
It allows you to welcome yourself to eat. When I have a meeting, I prepare my meal beforehand, I make myself a coffee, I’m quiet and I often have this feeling: I welcome myself, I make a nice table and even if the meal is short, it’s a time for me, it’s taking care of myself.
Absolutely.
Thinking about it, I feel that taking action is more important than anticipating; it’s as if I have a value judgment, whereas anticipating is also an action.
For example, this morning in the kitchen, the fish were very wet after defrosting, and they had to be wiped. I went to get a paper towel without thinking that I needed a plate to put the wet paper towels on, another one to put the wiped fish on, cut the paper towels before starting… In the kitchen, it’s more like retroactive; it’s like skipping a step for fear of not being able to do it.
You knew that you were cooking fish today, so you had plenty of time to anticipate all these little gestures: when you enter the kitchen, you make them as a priority and it goes on by itself without any obstacle, constraint or stress.
Yes, that’s true. Otherwise I have to ask someone to take a plate out because my hands are dirty, or go back and forth to the sink. In handiwork, I think it makes sense.
In the kitchen it’s the same thing; if you have that handiwork skill, you have it in the kitchen too.
And I can tell you that when you practice, it becomes completely natural.
Doing this in the kitchen allows me to be more in tune with the food, and to be more creative.
Absolutely.
I’m in symbiosis with what I’m doing, I’m no longer separated from the pan, from the food. In the kitchen I feel everything, and it gives me great joy to see this transformation.
This anticipation goes a long way for me: knowing that I’ll need paper towels to finish cleaning the pan, I prepare a sheet of paper in advance and put it on the roll. For me it allows for fluidity without disturbance, without obstacles.
I feel a great happiness listening to you because for years I lived it like a maniac, before finally accepting it. And now hearing you speak, I feel that resistance is buried and it is a great relief to understand that it is not at all a personal specificity of mania.
I’d be a maniac if I imposed it on everyone.
You are asking us to anticipate and I feel that you are right to ask us. It has nothing to do with something personal that you would impose.
Absolutely, for me it’s part of the dynamic of life.
Not long ago, I wanted to make a cake: I took out the flour, the sugar, I broke the eggs, and when I put the yeast in, no yeast.
For years, I took a shower without even thinking about putting my clothes next to my clothes.
The ability to anticipate is sometimes very strong in mismatch people, in order to anticipate all the bugs that may occur. If it’s too strong, the project doesn’t start, but for some people who are perhaps very matchy it’s interesting to have that in mind, it helps to balance.
Yes, you have to have both, ideally.
The energy, the goal, the intention come from the match, in fact the mismatch has no energy. The mismatch sees everything that’s out of sync, everything that doesn’t fit, everything that might be blocking, that might not be perfect. The match doesn’t see the holes in the road, the mismatch only sees the holes in the road. To set up a project, you need both. In a book on NLP, I read that to set up a business, the ideal is to be five, three match and two mismatch. If you have more mismatch than match it doesn’t work, and if you have too many matches “you get the walls”. Mismatching helps to anticipate risks: what could go wrong? In relation to this theme, I find the question of the water leak that we are currently dealing with very interesting: I think that there is really very little risk that we won’t be able to repair it.
But there is a risk. Imagine: no water in the kitchen, no water anywhere, and the plumber unavailable because there are two holidays!
Risk assessment, generally speaking, always involves two aspects: frequency, i.e., the percentage of probability that the risk will occur, and then impact. And here in this case, the percentage of probability is really very low, but the impact is really high, so it still gives a high risk.
Everything we are saying here at the functional level is linked to the existential level, which comes from pre-sensory perception. This space of emptiness has opened up to me with anticipation as I practice it; creativity comes from nothing, and it’s also directly linked to the deployment of the basic value. When you enter there, you enter the dynamics of life. The dynamic of life is fueled by this nothingness, with the faculty of anticipation. You can also see the trends. When I see the future, am I going towards the future or is the future coming towards me? The future comes towards me, and that’s why I can easily anticipate it, not necessarily in the details, but in the main trends.
Yes, it’s a bit like the man at the end of the street who was just a silhouette, and now I see details of him. But it’s hard to describe that feeling.
It’s not really a feeling. It’s hard to find the words, because it’s not a feeling.