The Five Year Plan

Last December Catalina and I made a five year plan. We took as our model the third five year plan of communist China, whose stated objectives were 1) to solve food, clothing and housing problems, 2) to strengthen national defense and make breakthroughs in technology, and 3) to build an economy of self-reliance. Not an unreasonable agenda for a young and crunchy peacenick couple with ambitions of world transformation, it seemed to us.

Suitably inspired, we taped a piece of newsprint to the kitchen wall and drew a black line from left to right, a fat timeskewer on which to fix, order, and slowroast our dreams. And after cracking a bottle of good wine, opening a little fromage tres forte, and setting Mariachi Madness at full blast, we got to work, heaving black and formless hopes from the unexplored recesses of our psyches, shaping them into appetizing forms, and setting them on the clean page for skewering. All sorts of dreams came out, big and small, wild and domestic, dreams about ourselves, about others, about the world; there were trips, deadlines, wendepunkte, nows-or-nevers, crises, resolutions, ripenings, and retractions. Each was written down, circled, and pinned in place by a thin black tether that connected to some particular spot in time. And on the very tip of the skewer, at the far right hand side of the page, surrounded in a big cartoon cloud and marked through with a red question mark, was the picture of a baby. Baby in five years, we decided, exchanging sly winks and a little tender innuendo: what the hell, maybe by then we'll have our lives in order.

Well, that was the plan. But someone tipped the kid off about his place on Life's Shiskabob and he wasn't happy: he called his buddy Bruno over in production and two days later Catalina was pregnant. Back to the drawing board. The Protozoogle had to be moved from the far right to the far left hand side of the picture, and all the other dreams had to be de-skewered, one by torturous one, to let us get the Baby where the Baby wanted to be, right at the beginning of things. And there we were, two bumbling novices, lost and confused in the kitchen, all those dreams just lying around the page, leaking their juices, drying out, unpalatable and disorganized. Start over? We thought about it, but got nervous: what if there were other secret orders that we didn't know about? What if we re-organized the dreams, only to find once again that we'd made some critical omission, or an ordering error, and had to take them all off again? Was this any way to run a dream kitchen?

The answer, curiously, seems to be 'yes'. I don't think it is a coincidence that the relentless failure of Mao's policies did nothing to persuade him to abandon them: his five year plans continued, the state slogged on, he died, things changed. If nation-states have these problems, what can we expect on the level of the benighted hippy couple? Error seems to be a fundamental part of this activity, as if there were a kind of visionary quantum principle that set some lower bound on the product of a dream's importance and its accuracy. Planning, especially radical planning, is a hit and miss sort of affair: unless you limit yourself to purely achievable ambitions (in which case you miss out on the exciting ones) some reshuffling is guaranteed.

So last night, almost precisely a year after the first, abortive five year plan, we sat down to draft a new one. Older, wiser, a little chastened but no less brazen, we chose once again to take our lead from the author of the Little Red Book and ignore the gross failures of the central planning committee, plunging boldly ahead with new ideas, new visions, new timescales. Five years is actually a good timeframe for human planning. It represents about 7% of the average lifespan, a considerable chunk but not so much that everything blends into some hazy contemplation of the The Future. It is a span that permits concrete actions (trip to the Riviera, Spring 2010; first child, Summer 2012), but extends far enough into the future as to allow speculative thought to play a guiding role (indeed, concrete actions typically expire in a year or two, at which point you've either got speculative thought or nothing at all.)

For all its value as an exercise in fusing hard practicalities with free meditation, however, the five year plan forces some hard questions. In five years you can make your fortune, get a doctorate, write a novel, drink yourself to ruin, become fluent in Russian, take holy orders. In five years my child will be talking, dancing, throwing baseballs, fluent in two languages, conscious of how bad my guitar playing is, clamoring for a brother. Certain parts of the world (both internal and external) will be fundamentally different in five years time, other parts (both internal and external) essentially the same. Do I wish to control that change? Respond to it? Be it? Ignore it? Time moves at different rates in different places; the difficulty of the five year plan is in choosing which temporal stream to commit to.

But by God we were committed to something. We took out the usual paraphernalia, the wine, the snacks, the music. The paper went up on the wall. This time we put a child on the left, a pudgy bear of a boy with a sweet but concerned look, from whose karmic center a number of lines emerged and headed right. Each line was to represent a possible future, a set of independent sequences of contingent events. Ha ha, we said. Let Fate try to thwart us now. And crossing our arms, smug in our cleverness and invulnerable to turns of destiny, we sat, still and smug, sipping our wine, beating time to the mariachi's, chewing our brie. We sat, and we stared, and we thought, and we stared some more, now with hope, now with sinking heart, stared into the vast expanse of empty newsprint that was to hold and nourish our dreams, and wondered what color we should make the links.