Well In Advance

Over the years, you learn to plan Thanksgiving dinner well in advance.

We’re planning an elaborate feast for Thanksgiving this year. (For my immediate family, because that’s clearly the right choice). Each dish is a favorite of one or more in our house; they’ve all been in rotation for years.

Some of our traditional family recipes require days of prep work, making doughs, roasting squashes, boiling cranberries. Other recipes are prepared all on Thursday, but require special ingredients. I’m only grocery shopping every other week these days, so I bought most of those ingredients a full 10 days before the big day.

We aren’t having concerts these days, at least nothing like the concerts of 2019 and before. But it’s in planning concerts and rehearsals that I gained the mindset to plan for Thanksgiving. Because, of course, we can’t plan a concert on the day it’s happening. Weeks–sometimes months–of preparation go into the big day. (I’ll never forget the painstaking work to get Veljo Tormis’ 10-minute long Incantatio Maris Aestuosi off the page with my 12-voice high school group…it was the musical equivalent of prepping a turducken for Thanksgiving. Deciding to put it into the repertoire a few weeks before performance would not have been possible, just as you couldn’t wake up Thanksgiving morning and decide to serve a turducken.)

The art of planning well in advance requires a bifurcation of mind – focusing simultaneously on the present and on some moment in the future. Without a focus on both, you will not successfully arrive at that future moment.