I recently read the 10-year plan of a blogger I keep up with who’s now taking a little break from her paying job to get her life in order. As I’m on a break as well it got me thinking about my 10-year plan. As much as Tom and I have no idea what we’ll be doing a year from now there are some goals we have in mind and I thought writing them down might give me a more directed and hopeful outlook, at least for today. Then I thought, hmmm… this list is pretty boring and obvious: Have children, have a house, Tom having a fulfilling career, investment in our church and family… See what I mean? These are already on our mind all the time. Though I’m plenty directed and hopeful I’m not more directed, nor hopeful.
So let’s look at a 1-year plan. Eeps! I just got chills as I wrote that, and now I have a funny feeling in my stomach not helped by my coffee for breakfast. Wow! This list is already a lot more exciting. And I haven’t even started it yet. OK, here goes.
Between now and July 2012 I plan to…
Begin writing to my missionary friends regularly, and to my grandpa and grandma. That is only four people and my plan is a letter once a month with extra letters as necessary. This plan is so doable it’s ridiculous and I concocted it months ago and yet… no letters. I have some block about it, the same kind of block I get when I plan to read my bible daily. I need to get past the block: to push off from the shore and start swimming (that’s how it feels). Maybe I could excuse not wanting to read and write before because of school but I am well on from those days now – nearly a month away – and my desire to write has, obviously, returned.
Read my bible everyday. Everything, everything is better when I do this. There is no reason not to. Push off. Swim.
Start and make successful an Etsy store with Becky, the expectant mother. A woman (I am always thrown when I use that word for someone younger than I am) from my church is expecting her first, unexpected, baby. She needs an income due to her husband’s career situation and we want to keep her at home. This is a cause I really believe in, and it could be so fun, educational and profitable. I will be selling vintage clothing (a dream of mine) alongside her hand-made from vintage-material blouses. It could be so great and help so much. I want to work hard at this.
Make moves in the house-buying direction. Sound vague? It is. I don’t want to set my sights too high, especially since I love it here in my little apartment with our gorgeous, huge tree, our nearly floor-to-ceiling windows, our convenient location, our landlord fixing plumbing problems and the memories we’ve made in the year + we’ve lived here. But Tom and I long to have household projects and a yard to work on and work in and no amount of cleanliness and ease can substitute the good, hard work of owning a little dump that all our own. Once we get our ducks in a row, round up paperwork, etc. I am going to talk to a loan officer about what we can afford, if anything and then we’ll see what comes to us in the area. I have my eye on a tiny, tiny house several blocks away. But I always have my eye on something. That’s just how I like to daydream.
Become pregnant. I don’t know if I can put this down. It seems very out of our control. But I cannot deny that I will be planning for this, and have been already. Though, I am taking a few steps back. I don’t want to get ahead of God’s plan for us. I’m gradually giving away things I’ve saved that aren’t too sentimental knowing that when it does happen 9 months will be plenty of time to plan for a family that has been planning all their lives and plans not to plan much anyway. We won’t have to find a new apartment; I won’t have a job I can’t leave; the child will be clothed, fed, changed and loved on to its heart’s content. It will never cry. At least, this is how it seems now. There isn’t much to plan. We only need to grow ever closer to God and to each other and patiently wait, and we will be ready.
See all of the family that we can. I recently realized we have a genius system for this:
Christmas with Tom’s mom, stepfather and sister, as we’ve been doing since before we were married.
Late Spring/Early Summer with my mom and some sisters. There has always been some cause for this: Brooke’s wedding, our wedding (though that was September), Suzanne’s wedding, Scarlet’s birth, my graduation and next year? Another birth? We’ll have to think of something.
Late Summer: Seattle with Tom’s father’s side of the family. They all live up there and we went (for my first time) last year for cousin Audrey’s wedding. I now adore Seattle and can’t wait for August when we’ll be going for cousin Han’s nuptials. There are three more unmarried cousins but despite what they may decide to do I think we should go up there every summer for the rest of our lives. We’re the type of geese that fly north. Give me those grey skies and salty air!
Finally, we have Thanksgiving with my dad and sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews, and grandpa, if he’s willing (and he’d better be!).
Isn’t that the best plan you’ve ever heard of? It makes me love my life even more.
Reconnect with The Pearl Buck Center. I don’t know what this means. I don’t know if I’ll volunteer regularly or sporadically or apply for a job but I miss it and not only the people. I miss the regularity of it. I miss waking up and having a schedule and doing purposeful work from this time until that time and heading home on the bus wondering how it is that the time goes by faster every day. I would like a job there, I would like more control, but I am not ready just yet, I’m really not. Tom has encouraged me and I have considered it and in ways longed for it but I’m not ready yet. I need more time. I have a sense of having unfinished business in my personal life. But I need to make good use of this time as a free agent so that I don’t wait forever.
Paint the bathroom and re-caulk the shower. I’ve decided that even if we buy a house next month I want to invest in some little things around the apartment. I want that sense of accomplishment, and I want the work. Its good work and it will benefit us and possibly others. I’ve started the painstaking re-caulking and will do more today. Then it’s off to the hardware store for all the fixin’s. I’m excited.
Finish refurbishing the furniture I started on last summer. Yeah. Time, hard work, you get the idea...
Cook and bake a lot more. This fell off with the busy-ness of last term and I miss it. I don't even enjoy eating out as much because it's less of a special event. I'm tired of feeding Tom spaghetti and eggs and other cop-out meals (although they are awesome) every night. I also am tired of sending him off to work with no food and imagining what he must be eating and what it must be costing us to poison his hard-working body. I want to improve my talent, my knowledge and my efficiency in the kitchen. I think it is so worthwhile, and honestly, dreamy. I love sitting and imagining a life of kitchen proficiency. Not necessarily soufflés or anything, just mounds of incredible salads and fresh-baked bread. Mmmm. Yes! Yes, please!
Convince everyone that babysitting should be done at my place and then make my place babysitting heaven. I love having kids in my life.
Oh my gosh, so much! And I love picking up fun things that I think kids would love but then no one comes to play with them.
I want to help out parents who need time for this or that. But I don’t super-love running around town on foot and on the bus getting to such-and-such place at such-and-such time and leaving all my home projects abandoned, and I don’t super-love being in someone else’s space. Sometimes its fun, but I get bored of being away from home. I loved watching Baby E regularly at my old apartment, even though that place was a hole.
It would be incredible to do daycare for a living, but I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew. This would be good for now. Just drop off your baby in a basket at my doorstep, they’ll be well looked after.
Love my husband and my best friend better. I want to do this with everyone. But they are the two people I am closest with in my life and a good place to start. I want them to have complete confidence in my love for them and my devotion to them. I want them to feel that they can tell me anything (though, guys, you don’t have to tell me everything). I want to help them to be the people that God wants them to be and encourage them in every good thing. I don’t want to worry about them or cause them to worry. I want to make them good food and tell them good stories and to make them know that they are beautiful, hilarious, sweet and endlessly interesting hard-workers – but that even if they weren’t I would still love them. I want them to know without me putting words to it how much I appreciate them.
Hopefully I will achieve this by July 2012 and then, like I said, you’re next.
There are 12 things for twelve months, reaching well into 2012; a list of things I feel I can and should accomplish and a list that doesn’t make me panic when reading over it.
In fact, it’s a list that gives me a thrill.
