The Ten Year Plan

Two years ago, I had to take a seminar on time management to maintain my Arkansas state teaching license. I was particularly bitter about this, because the class had nothing to do with how effective a teacher I was. I might have been able to demonstrate some actual competence in teaching - really prove that I deserved my salary and the continued good graces of the Arkansas Department of Education - had I simply been observed in my classroom. However, when judged on my ability to manage my life, I failed miserably at every exercise, embarrassed myself in class, and began to see what my friend Amanda was talking about when she told me I multitasked like a man. (There were several men in the class. None of them multitasked worse than I did).

My co-worker Gary led the seminar and assigned us monthly readings from books called things like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity and other horrors. I was doing terribly by the second meeting, and it was clear that, as a modus operandi, I preferred and was predisposed to procrastination over productivity.

But the absolute pinnacle of my inability to manage my life came during our final assignment. Gary had been threatening that we would at some point be tasked with creating our five and ten year plans. Up until that point I was convinced it would become some optional project assigned on the last day of class; I thought maybe because we had spent more time than alloted in the syllabus practicing things like to-do list-writing and task prioritization, that maybe there simply would not be time - like what used to happen to the last unit in tenth grade English. But then again, this was a class about time management, and Gary has apportioned the time well despite straying slightly from the syllabus.

The idea of a five or ten year plan terrified (and still terrifies) me. When the day finally came, I asked Gary if he could model an example, and he started to laugh, realized that I was serious, and then denied my request. He told me to do my best and left me to my own devices.

I didn't even try to write the five year plan. It was too soon. Planning to achieve something in five years meant having to be working toward it now, and I certainly was not in a position to accomplish anything that soon.

So I moved straight onto the ten year plan. I wrote "TEN YEAR PLAN" at the top of the page, played with my pencil some, then observed with envy the speed and ambition with which my colleagues wrote their responses. I was foolish to assume that because we were all just about the same age, the others in the class would be equally lacking in goals and plans. But watching this high strung group of 20 somethings scribble furiously without pause put me ill at ease and I shifted, noticeably, in my chair. I jotted a few things down that I might want to do some day, hoping I would be allowed to pass when we shared as a group.

Gary asked us to go around the room and read either of our plans. My nemesis in the class, whom I barely knew but managed to loathe with irrational ferocity, volunteered to go first. "Well, I want to go to Yale to work towards a PhD in English Literature, focusing on post-feminist readings of the classics. If I want to publish in my first year, I will need to start emailing professors this month to secure a research position. I have to take my GRE at the end of the month and complete my applications within the next month. After I publish in the first year, I plan to spend the summer researching at Oxford, the grant for which I'll have to secure next fall, making it even more crucial to pair with a distinguished scholar this summer. I hope to finish my doctorate in 4 years and publish two major works in the process. I plan to secure a job after my fourth year, and finish my dissertation shortly thereafter." I may not have gotten it word for word, but that certainly captures the drama.

Now, I have trouble keeping my facial expressions to myself in general, but after hearing that, I think I might have actually buried my face in my hands and moaned. I half-listened to a few other people's plans, many of which included new career paths, higher education, marriage, babies, and location changes.

When my turn came, part of me wanted to pass, but I had already reacted so badly to others' plans, that I thought it would be even more embarrassing to forfeit my turn. So I sat up, cleared my throat, and read my ten-year plan:

TEN YEAR PLAN
1. Learn French.
2. Improve my Spanish.
3. Get my PhD in something.
4. Own a cat.
5. Flip an apartment.
6. Build something.
7. Publish an essay.
8. Learn to ride a bike.

After finishing, I was afraid to look up. Most people in the group probably thought I was playing around and not taking the exercise seriously. They were partly right; I didn't believe that people actually lived their lives this way and thought the exercise was a little stupid. I mean really, who actually sticks to these things?

But my classmates were also wrong - it wasn't that I didn't try. There is a side of me - greatly exaggerated whilst I was a teacher, spending as much time as I did planning out even the most minute details of each day - that very much wanted to be that person: a person who not only had a plan, but who sought and found comfort in having a plan. It was this side of me that forced me to read the self-help book chapters Gary would prescribe, in hopes they would eradicate the comfort I habitually found in the certainty of my uncertainty.

And yet, another part of me was perfectly proud of my plan. Its flexibility, its ability to accommodate adventure and personal growth and change all made me want to catch the eye of my enemy and stick my tongue out at her. My plan is a million times more awesome than your plan. In fact, I am a million times more awesome than you.

And, after a year, my feelings have not really changed. There is a great tension between my desire to plan nothing and keep my options fully open and my desire to construct for myself an ambitious and well-laid path. This tension does not seem to want to go away. It refuses to let the knots at my shoulder blades loosen, to let my breath slow and deepen, and to allow me to gently resign to either fate. It is pleased to have successfully evicted from my soul the confidence of my college years and to have cultivated in its place an unabating feeling of doubt.

Most of all, it enjoys watching me constantly bewilder myself, evermore amazed by the nonsensical things that I convince myself are a normal part of life. In the end, I regard the way I am currently living my life and planning my future much in the way I regard dogs walking on three legs: it's not done well, but I'm surprised to see it done at all. And I suppose that's okay for now.

I mean, I like those dogs.