I Want A Five-Year Plan Too

Politician have them, countries have them, corporations have them, institutions of all kind have them.

I don’t see why I can’t have a Five-Year Plan of my own.

They are the nearly perfect invention for the type of person who dreams big and has a lot of bright ideas without having to go to the trouble of bringing them into the world.

I see now that my error has been getting involved in efforts that have a beginning, middle, and end and which people can, unfortunately, take a look at and conclude whether they are done or not.

Big mistake.

I was young! What else can I say? I fell into errors, ran with the wrong people, had many influences upon me, not all of them good.

I thought the road to riches and fame was to establish a goal, make a plan, work towards its completion with vigor and industry, and finally take it across the finish line.

Looking back at the confused lad that I was, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Only now, in late late late late late youth do I see that what I really needed was a Five-Year Plan.

Where was the type of friend who would have pulled me aside and talked sense to me?

”Ixnay on the easily-measurable deliverable, my friend. There’s a better way.”

It is never too late however and I am ready to jump on the bandwagon.

It’s main effect, this plan, or so I’m hoping, is that people will leave me alone for the better part of half a decade.

Understand: I do not shun human company. Under ordinary circumstances I take as much pleasure in my fellow man as the next guy.

It is only in the matter of describing what exactly it is I am doing that I wish to invoke this Five-Year Plan.

I grant that to the unpracticed eye what I am doing can look a lot like a person doing absolutely nothing.

It’s impressions like these that I’d like to short circuit.

When the topic comes up, even tangentially – say someone casually remarks ‘when are you going to make something of yourself?’ or ‘how do you expect to live?’ – then all I have to answer is, “all that’s covered in my Five-Year Plan. Now, pass those potato chips, could you?”

This last I ask in a polite but brisk manner to indicate that the topic is closed. That is that.

Enough of this, and I intend to do it all the time, all the time, and people soon enough will shy away from inquiring after matters so personal and potentially so damaging to my self-esteem.

I don’t have a lot of ambitions in these matters, in fact I intend to accomplish almost nothing during the entire five years.

It is only in the week or two right before the five-year deadline arrives that I will begin to give any thought to it at all.

With a sigh of resignation, but showing no lack of internal grit either, I will prepare the paperwork to extend the plan past its rather arbitrary five-year limit.

“It is to laugh,” I say to myself, and perhaps to others in close touch with my thinking on these matters. “It is to laugh to think that I could accomplish all I set out to do in my Five-Year Plan in five years!”

I may shrug my shoulders ruefully and shake my head, now an older and wiser man. “Youth!” we will all laugh, and perhaps toast its perpetual optimism.

“No,” I shall say, “I can’t possible get much of a start on accomplishing what I want to accomplish, much less bring it to a successful conclusion, in a mere five years.”

“And besides,” I go on, “as it so happens what I thought I was doing turns out to be not at all what I was actually doing. This happens to artists all the time, you know. They think they are directing their own destiny, when in fact the gods have other plans for them. While I thought I was writing an opera in the modern style on the history and destiny of the macadamia — working title: Some Kind of Nut! — and then I thought I was writing a non-fiction bestseller, Mollusk Hunter, My Adventures Among Our Invertebrate Soft-Shelled Unsegmented Brothers, it turns out that what I was really doing was establishing a Utopian community for artists and regional craftsmen at the bottom of an abandoned salt mine deep beneath an isolated spot on The Great Plains.” I shrug and smile humbly at the vicissitudes of fate and the gods and what not. “Go figure.”

Feeling my way, I say, “I shall need ten years. At the least.”

I pause to see how this goes down.

“I mean fifteen years. I mean twenty years. I mean twenty-five years. Oh, let’s split the difference and call it twenty-two years,” I conclude, which I consider to be rather generous of me, if I do say so.

And, well, the paperwork goes in and I don’t hear anything back, so I presume that I am approved.

I’d approve it too if I were them!

It’s a startling vision I’ve presented to them, exactly the type of forward-looking thinking that the world is going to need if we’re going to sort this whole thing out.

With an extension of this sort, it is only natural that I must spend a lot of time thinking of how the new schedule will impact the project, some of it good, but some of it bad too.

This type of brainstorming and conceptualizing will take the better part of the first seven years of the first extension.

You have an eye for detail and notice that I say ‘the first extension’ for it soon becomes clear – well, not soon soon, but right there at the seventeen year mark – that in my boyish enthusiasm I have again woefully overextended myself.

I am merciless upon myself in these matters, in the way I drive myself like some sort of pack animal towards the future benefit to mankind, without a thought to my own well-being or overall life satisfaction.

Well, that is just the way I am.

Towards the end of whatever ridiculous length of time I have now publicly allotted for the completion of The Plan, as I and the rest of the world now refer to it, people will start hearing me say in passing, “you know, Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

I will say this to everyone on the same elevator with me, I will say it to the produce manager at the grocery store, I will flag down the newspaper delivery guy at four in the morning and chase after the mailman many cul-de-sacs over merely to remark, “you know, Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

This gets the idea out there, plants the seed, that no sooner do I climb to one peak of The Plan than an entirely new vista opens up before my eyes! The possibilities!

This goes on and on.

Again, my boyish enthusiasm has taken over, though as it turns out, if I have done the math right, I will be about eighty years old at this point.

The Plan at this point becomes more of an archival project where I gather and organize my papers, grant interviews, and reflect on this great work to which I have devoted my life.

Though it still runs a little short of actual completion, meaning that my spiritual heirs will need to carry on with it past my time here on earth.

Carry on with it, lads and lasses, carry on with it.

Whatever it is.

If you can ever, ever figure that out.

I have given it all I’ve got.