The Five Year Plan (BEDS 004)

You know what I suck at? Long-term planning. I am physically incapable, it seems, of planning everything beyond the end of tomorrow. Like, I just can't do it. I have many a talent, and that simply isn't included. I had a weekly planner mousepad, once. I thought it would help.

It didn't.

I tried so hard. I would sit down at the beginning of the week, carefully consider my work schedule and school schedule and literally everything that I had going on in my life. I would judge how long a task would take, and plan an asburd amount of extra time for it. In most cases, in fact, it was actually a rather reasonable schedule.

But something would come up, as something always does. I would miss one item on my to-do list for the day, and then suddenly the rest of my week would be invalid. Because guess what: each item on every to-do list for the rest of the week was dependent on me getting that one freaking thing done on Monday!

"So just bump it all back a day," you say. But guess what! I can't! It's all there, in ink, permenently visible to my vulnerable soul! I can't just change it. Do you know how long it took to discover this delicate balance of regular updates? Three years! Aka: TOO FREAKING LONG.

So you can see, from my inability to efficiently plan for the week, why I would dislike the idea of a 5 Year Plan. I don't think I've even broken into Year 1 yet--I'm still rooted in Year 0! I can barely plan for today, let alone five freaking years from now. (Plus, I'll be, like, twenty-seven. Twenty-seven! I don't want to think about that, thank you.)

How do you even make a five-year plan? That's the sort of thing they tell you to do in your first year of university, when your eyes are still full of hope and the combination of student debt and a retail job hasn't killed your soul yet. That's the sort of thing that they tell you to do in high school, when you still think adulthood is going to be the Best Thing Ever. (Spoiler alert: run away.) I'm pretty sure you have to have your life together to even think about making a Five Year Plan.

Me? I avoided my desk for three days because of a giant spider I watched crawl across it earlier in the week. I am the very opposite of put together.

I mean, don't get me wrong--I have goals. I have dreams. I'm a semi-functioning human being. I like to think that I'll get accepted into an international program in Walt Disney World, and spend all of next summer working there. I like to think that I'll have my university degree by the time I'm 24. (Okay...maybe 25.) I have ideas for more tattoos that I want to plaster my body with. I find myself considering moving back to the East coast after graudation.

And somewhere in between all that, I like to think I'll get published.

But in the last couple years I've learned a thing or do--namely, it's okay to take things one thing at a time. I work better when I narrow my focus, weedle my to-do list down to a single day. I can't let myself get caught up in everything I have to do tomorrow, next week, next month...just to complete a deadline that I've imposed on myself.

I don't have a Five Year Plan. But I make goals based on the seasons, I pick my passion and run with it, and somehow manage to get stuff done along the way. Maybe not as much as I hoped, but something is better than nothing.

There is no time limit. Just a list I made at one in the morning, and the hope that I'll complete it sometime in this lifetime.

Until later,

- Justyne