Quote / Theory: “Life’s what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” I talked about this with Matt last night after the Black Belt Jones party. I’ve come to a strange accommodation with this quote. One of its many origins is the Lennon song Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy). I used to think that it meant that people were too caught up in their ‘other plans’ and missed the life that was passing by around them. Now I think that’s a seriously naive reading. I now think that rather than reading an ‘instead’ at the end of the sentence, the profundity of the sentence comes from the potential double meanings around ‘when’. i think an interpretation that makes more sense to me suggests that life does in fact not happen when you are not making plans – that the ‘when’ is a ‘while’ is an ‘at only those times when’. Living is in the distraction of things, not in their absence. I said all this to Matt. He thought it was depressing.
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