Five Year Plan

Over on Syntax of Seaweed (must remember to ask if that blog title is just an attempt to fuse the concepts of linguistics and veganism, of it there's a story behind it), Colm has been talking about making a Five Year Plan.

I realised the other day that I'm about two years into my last "five year plan". I came up with it while I was cycling around Estonia in May/June 2009, and it's now May/June 2011, so...

So I guess it's time to see where I'm at, in the grand scheme of things.

I have to admit, the FYP I made back in 2009 was largely the result of a mid-tour crisis. Since 2007 I had been flirting with a vague idea that I would eventually move to Estonia to work and study for at least a year, but I hadn't really narrowed down what would be involved in such a thing.

I had been "Living Vague" for a few years at this point, having come to the conclusion that my ability to make decisions about my future left something to be desired. This was the result of a roof-top epiphany I had back in 2005. To put this in context, I have to go back to 2003.

In 2003 I was completing my honours year in a double degree: Arts (majoring in English Literature) and Education (secondary English/Drama). At this point in my life, my plan for the future was to teach high school English and Drama for a couple of years before setting up a private Speech studio. I was teaching part-time, finishing my honours programme and thinking of trying to get work in Canberra (the country's capital), as I thought it would be a good experience. I had applied for a job there, and thought I had a pretty good idea about what would happen next.

In 2005 I found myself standing on the roof of a small school in a small town in Tasmania, applying a large sign to a short wall. There was one point, while waiting for my boss to bring the rest of the equipment up onto the roof, where I looked out over the rolling hills to the sea, and thought: "How the heck did I get here?"

At that time, I never wanted to teach again. Although I still had vague dreams of becoming a private Speech teacher, I was really looking at any path that would take me away from classrooms. I realised I really had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Not a clue.

I also realised that, really, I never had. I just gave people a sensible sounding answer whenever they asked me, and then went along with that. When my "plans" were tested, they crumbled like the poorly formed illusions they were.

So, in 2005 I decided my plan for the future was "just keep swimming".

In 2007 I decided I wanted to spend some time in Estonia, but was still basically taking my outlook on life from a combination of Dory (from Finding Nemo) and assorted lyrics from Robert Lee Castleman's songs (Well I'm blessed, I guess/By never knowing which road I'm choosing/To me the next best thing/To playing and winning is playing and losing).

"Living Vague", like I said. Just waiting to see what comes next, and giving up the illusion that I can have any control over it.

Then, halfway through my cycling tour of Estonia, I found myself in Rakvere. Now, I'm sure Rakvere has its good points, but it was the ugliest town I had encountered on my tour, and I was there for a proper rest-stop. I had passed through some genuinely pretty places, and was now cooling my heels (well, actually walking around a lot) in a town that seemed to consist mostly of ugly Soviet-style apartments. After you've done the castle, and gone for a walk around town, there really isn't that much else to do in Rakvere.

It gave me time to think, and I was suddenly over come with a sense of "What are you doing with your life?" You want to move to Estonia? Why? What are you going to do? Where will that get you?

If it is possible to have a crisis of faith in regards to vagueness, I was having one. This nagging sense that I didn't know what I wanted out of life haunted me for the next three days. Then I found myself in the Liiv Museum.

I had no idea who Johann Liiv was before I walked into that museum. I was only familiar with a handful of Estonian writers, and I only really knew them by reputation - my grasp of the language wasn't good enough for anything else. The woman who came to give me a ticket asked me what I was doing in Estonia. One thing lead to another, and I found myself saying that I wanted to come back in a few years to study literature.

It was something I had said before, but up until that moment I hadn't realised I meant it. Previously, it had just been an idea I was playing with, now it was an honest-to-goodness goal.

I left that museum with a book of Liiv's poems and an idea of where I wanted to be in five years time.

Then I started to think about what I would need to do in the next five years to get there.

Here's the list of things I came up with:

• Learn Estonian
• Learn at least German or Russian - preferably both
• Get a Master's degree in something
• Get some papers published in journals
• Get TEFL qualifications

So far I've got the Masters and I've started making progress with Estonian and German. Russian has moved to the back burner a little, and I personally blame Italian. Not that I'm learning Italian. I am so not learning Italian. I haven't even thought about the TEFL qualifications yet, but I've still got three years to go, and quite frankly I think the Diploma of Languages and a Grad Cert in Tertiary Teaching is enough to go on with for the time being.

Oh, and I've recently had my first honest-to-goodness academic journal article published in the Australian Library Journal.

That's not too bad, I guess. I really need to focus more on the journal article side of things, I've got a few degrees to finish off and I need to start thinking about that TESL stuff eventually, but I seem to be making fairly decent progress through my five year plan.

Which means it must be about time for something completely unexpected to carry me away in a totally unpredictable direction.

Bring it on, I say. If the past is anything to go by, 2013 should be an interesting place.