There are days when I look at my desk in the evening and feel as though I have done an enormous amount. Notes lie in front of me, several pages are open, thoughts have been sorted, possibilities compared, perhaps I have even restructured something or thought it all through again from the beginning. Everything looks like work, movement, progress. And yet there are those particular moments when I suddenly realise that I have not moved a single step closer to what actually matters. I have kept myself busy, but I have not begun. In the past, I would hardly have seen a problem in that. I would have said that I was being thorough, that I wanted to prepare properly, that I needed to understand before I acted. Today, I see it rather differently. Preparation can be extremely valuable. But it can also become a remarkably comfortable place in which I can remain for a very long time without ever arriving where life actually begins.
Precisely because preparation looks so sensible, I did not associate it with procrastination for a long time. I used to imagine procrastination as something much more obvious. Doing nothing, distracting myself, choosing comfort, lacking discipline. But there is a much subtler form of it. It wears the face of diligence and responsibility. I can read one more book, make one more comparison, ask for one more opinion, improve one more thing before I decide. I can tell myself that the right moment has not yet come because I am still missing a certain piece of knowledge or because something is not quite finished. The interesting thing is that all of these reasons may even be true. That is precisely why they are so convincing. It does not have to be a lie I tell myself. It is enough to use one truth for so long that it protects me from having to face another.
Over time, I have come to understand that excessive preparation, for me, was often less about perfection than I had assumed. Beneath it lay something deeper: the wish to postpone a moment of uncertainty. As long as something is still being prepared, it has not really happened. An idea can remain perfect in my imagination for as long as I do not put it into practice. A text can be wonderful for as long as it exists only in my mind. A change can feel right for as long as I do not yet have to discover what it will actually do to my life. Preparation keeps possibilities open. Reality, by contrast, becomes concrete. At some point, it asks me to open a door without knowing exactly what lies behind it. That is where the pleasant sense of control that planning can give me begins to disappear.
I notice this pattern today not only in myself, but in many areas of everyday life. We live in a time when almost anything can be prepared for endlessly. Before we buy something, we compare. Before we travel, we read reviews and other people’s experiences. Before we change, we listen to podcasts, watch videos, follow people who seem already to be where we want to go. Even for deeply personal decisions, we have countless opinions and models at our disposal. In one sense, that is extraordinary, because we have access to knowledge that earlier generations could hardly have found so quickly. At the same time, this very abundance can mean that preparation is no longer a beginning, but becomes a world of its own. I can spend a very long time engaging with a subject and develop the feeling that I am already in the middle of it, even though I have not truly experienced it at all.
I became especially aware of this whenever I wanted to create something myself. Writing, for example. I can think about an idea, test its direction, turn individual phrases over in my mind and imagine how a text might eventually feel. But sooner or later there comes a point when thinking takes me no further. The blank screen or empty page cannot be filled with preparation. Something only begins to change when I actually start. Then sentences appear that I could never have planned in advance. Thoughts take a different direction, contradictions become visible, something alive begins to emerge. Again and again, this has reminded me how limited our idea of what is coming really is. We like to know the path before we step onto it. And yet some forms of knowledge come into being only because we begin to walk.
For me, this also touches on something fundamental in our relationship with security. We would like to know that a decision is right before we make it. We want to feel that something will work before we commit to it. We want to be prepared for reactions, consequences, possible mistakes, and for what other people may think of us. I know that desire very well. At the same time, I have experienced that real security rarely arises because every uncertainty has been removed. Much of what now seems obvious to me was not obvious at the beginning. It only became clear because I allowed myself to enter into it. Perhaps sometimes we are not really looking for more knowledge at all. Perhaps we are looking for a guarantee that no one can give us.
At this point, I see a connection with my book I – Your Best Liar. In it, I explore the subtle forms of self-manipulation, those inner narratives that sound so plausible that we fail to recognise them as a way of avoiding something. Preparation can become exactly that kind of narrative. I do not have to tell myself that I am afraid. I can tell myself that I simply want to be more thorough. I do not have to admit that I am avoiding a decision. I can explain that a few things still need to be clarified first. That is what makes this inner movement so fascinating. It is not crude. It does not force me into anything. It can even make me feel particularly sensible. Only when I become quiet enough do I begin to notice whether my preparation is genuinely serving me or whether it has already started to protect me from an encounter with myself.
For me, this is not about dismissing preparation. I value thinking things through, understanding connections and not making every decision impulsively. I have simply learned to pay attention to the point at which its quality begins to change. At first, preparation gives me clarity. Later, it may begin to reassure me. Later still, it can prevent me from moving at all. That transition is rarely obvious. There is no clear line telling me that I now know enough. I experience it more as an inner feeling. At some point, I notice that new information is no longer changing anything essential. It is simply giving me the pleasant feeling that I am still doing something. And that is exactly where preparation becomes, for me, a very elegant form of standing still.
These days, I am less interested in whether I am perfectly prepared. I am more interested in what happens when I stop hiding behind preparation. Often, it is surprisingly unspectacular. No great act of courage, no heroic moment, no sudden certainty. More like quietly crossing an invisible line. I write the first sentence. I make the decision. I begin to move. And as I do, something becomes available to me that was not there before. Not because I suddenly know more, but because experience has begun to speak to me. Perhaps that is why I now recognise so quickly when I start planning a path my feet could already be walking.