Planning Ahead

5. What do you hope to accomplish within the next ten years? Explain.

This year I will be twenty five, in ten I will be thirty five years old. In ten years I will have no right at all to call myself a kid anymore. I will be expected to have my life on track, to have a career, to maybe have a family of some sort. I will have to have my own place, my own life, I will have to be an adult. The problem with this is that I have no real plan, no ideas, no clue as to what ten years from now where I'll be.

I have hopes, I want to be a successful writer. Not famous, I just want to be making a living out of it, have a regular opinion column, and possibly have a few novels published. But you know what? Ten years ago, I didn't want that. Ten years ago I wanted to be a cartoonist, I wanted to draw and make people laugh. I wanted to be the next Charles Schultz, the next Bill Watterson. Ten years prior to that I wanted to be a 'Tool man' as I put it, not an engineer, or a mechanic, just a Tool Man.

Ten years... It may not seem like it, but it's a long time. Ten years I was still a teenager. Ten years I was still in High School. My life has changed so radically, so drastically. I have changed, I'm a different person than I was back then, so if I had gone through and planned to be a Cartoonist, and came to be the man I am today, what would my life be like? Is it smart to plan so far ahead? Is it smart to even think about ten years?

I see people who have these vast lifelong plans, they know how it's going to work. They're going to get their degree, then get a job, then find a husband or wife and settle down. They're gonna start a family in the suburbs and then grow old together. It sounds solid, but what happens to these people when the plan goes awry? What happens when life happens? I just cannot plan that far ahead, it's too distant, and there's too much to think on now. All the branches of choice and consequence create path I could never predict.

Now I am not saying plans are bad, you need plans, need to know where your going to get there. But shooting for the distance is sometimes not gonna work. You need to let life come in to it, need to let it rock the boat and change your mind. Need to allow some room for fluidity, when you come to the end you may find yourself in a place you never thought possible, and would never want to leave.

In ten years, I just hope I'm still doing this.