“Where do you see yourself in five years?” This question has always caused some anxiety in me. I can come up with ideal scenarios while also coming up with the worst case scenarios. People never want to hear worst case scenario five year plans. After all, the idea is that it’s a positive exercise. One is supposed to plan for the best case, something about visualization and how that will bring good things. But of course, anyone who truly uses visualizations will tell you it’s not enough, and often it doesn’t happen as you thought it. So what do you do in this cases? As a mess of anxieties and someone who legit believes in magic, I present to you the movable five year plan.
Be Prepared
Scouts motto, “Be Prepared”, was supposed to stand for reminding the kids that you must always be ready for the unexpected. Even if you packed everything right you don’t know if a sudden storm is gonna bring down your campsite (true story!). How does this apply to the five year plan? Well, you don’t pin all the mood board pictures based on only one scenario.
When we set something down as a certainty, we are kind of setting it in stone so to speak. The expression doesn’t let us remember that a lot of times, stone also fades. Erosion, weathering, stones are not as immutable as we thought.
Ok maybe you don’t go for the worse scenario like I tend to do, but you plan for multiple ones. Sometimes you learn the hard way that no matter what if you depend on only one plan, it can blow up in your face when you least expect it. This means that one of the best ways to avoid this is having several plans. For example, instead of one five year plan, you can divide it in more intervals. A one yea, three year, five year plan for example would give you some shorter time goals to attain better.
Set in stone
I think thats one of the biggest aspects of this that can cause these anxieties. When we set something down as a certainty, we are kind of setting it in stone so to speak. The expression doesn’t let us remember that a lot of times, stone also fades. Erosion, weathering, stones are not as immutable as we thought. A five year plan we are so certain has been carved into the mountain side will be there that we forget the mountainside itself is the product of changes in the rocks.
We can instead see how nature itself displays this. The stone remains but changed. Maybe that five year plan is not how is started, but some aspects remain. Maybe it is no longer in the same place or the same space in time. But there is still something that can be reached there. carvings in stone can be buffeted and weathered, but we still find many of them. The messages may be altered by time but something is there.
“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” -Ernest Hemingway
Five year plans – A movable feast
A movable feast is an expression originally meant the feast days that where on the same day but differing dates, such as the christian feast of Easter or Ash Wednesday. With time it has come also to mean that things change with time. It got associated to this even more when Ernest Hemingway called his posthumous memoirs about Paris A Movable Feast. This mutability, this idea that something can change but also remain close to how it was, is in part how I want to look at five year plans from now on.
Five year plans can be something that stresses out. That make our insecurities even worse when they don’t play out. They can be a source of comfort of something better to come as well. If we see them more like these movable feasts, like something that can maybe not be exactly as we set out for it, it could be a guiding light. In the end that’s what those moments of asking us where we see ourselves in x amount of years seeks to do. It wants us to be able to see something we strive for. So when something changes, when a plan seems to lead you down a different path remember: life itself is a movable feast. Remember to plan accordingly.
Featured Image: Black and White Positive Thinking Cup