She didn’t ask me; I don’t have a business or life coach. She asked this of my beautiful wife the other day, and my wife asked me last night while we watched the sunset.
I remember Joe DuBois asked me that in 1998. We were standing at the old timey semicircle sink, washing up after a day of running printing presses, and I told him I did not know. I mean, back then, I was five years out from college, and I told him that I hadn’t expected to be working as a printing press operator five years from then.
It’s pretty clear I’ve never really been much of a planner. My wife, on the other hand, does, so this question is right in her wheelhouse. She likes to plan out the week to come on Sunday nights, including the nights we’re staying in (all of them these days) and what we will eat for each meal. She likes to get a little more granular than that, but when the week unfolds, something always comes up which derails the weekly plan. Someone has a homework emergency. Work runs long. Or something. These variations stress her out a lot at times, whereas I am able to better go with the flow.
If I skip ahead in five year segments from my conversation with Joe, I would find myself working at an Internet startup that I hoped would make me rich. Five years later, I had been an Executive and had just struck out on my own as a consultant, but mostly was taking care of my two children. Five years later, both my kids are in school, and I’ve taken a contract with another startup that I hoped would make me rich–my billed income was certainly high, and I thought the sky was the limit (until my accountant calculated the annual tax increase, which sobered things quickly). I’d also started training in martial arts after my boys did. Five years later, my consulting work had gotten stale, and I took a full time position that’s not as swashbuckling, to say the least, as being an independent contractor. Five years from then, which is only three years from now, I’ll have a high school graduate and high school sophomore and…. Who knows?
If we reel back in the years in five year increments, we can see what I was blogging about on this day in history.
March 20, 2015
Book Report: Holiday Memory by Dylan Thomas (1978)
March 20, 2010
No posts on this date, but a couple on March 21:
This Administration Cannot See Clearly
Charity Founded By Former Elected Officials Blows Entire Budget On Overhead, Parties
An Unfortunate Turn To Boilerplate Health Care Sob Story
March 20, 2005
No posts on March 20, 2005, either, which is odd as it was at the height of my blogging. However, on March 21, I posted:
Book Report: Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War by Bob Greene (2000)
The Dogs That Didn’t Bark
Collateral Damage Audience
Post-Dispatch Gets It Right In Sidebar
But There Won’t Be Smoking Allowed
To be honest, that’s what the blog is really about: Giving me the ability to go back to a point in time and see what was going on in the world and in my life at the time. You, gentle reader, are just along for the slow-moving ride.
And where ever I am five years from now, I’ll know how I got there. But I’m not sure where that is, nor am I sure where I would want that to be.
