Sculpt your life
I can hardly be called an ageing hippy since I missed the 1960s revolution, and I bypassed the punk era in quiet conformity. I still had the usual amount of embarrassing teenage angst, with hours spent listening to LPs in my bedroom and moaning about how unfair life was. A line from one of these records has, rather annoyingly, stuck in my mind ever since, and influenced my attitude to life. It is from a Pink Floyd record, and its message is that one day, we look back and suddenly realize that the years have run past without us, and feel that somehow we missed the starting gun.
Hardly dramatic stuff, except that it raises the important point that we decide what path our life takes. Fate, luck or even predestination is often cited as the reason why our lives follow a certain course, but in real life we all have key decisions to make. No one else makes them for us. At critical times in our lives, should we trust to chance and circumstance or should we try to sculpt what is actually happening to us?
This was the question I was faced with when I realized my medical work had become stale and I needed a new challenge. Fortunately, this coincided with my hearing about the five-ten-fifteen-year plan. This can make life simpler for you.
Take a large piece of paper and draw four vertical lines, one above the other, down the left. Then draw a long horizontal line from the middle of each of these across the width of the page. Imagine the left side to be five years ago. Mark off, at roughly equal intervals along each horizontal line, -5, 0, 5, 10 and 15 years. Label one vertical line 'Family', another 'Work', then 'Finance' and finally 'Personal'. Draw a red line on each, starting at -5 — five years ago — and draw where you think your life was going at that time in each category. Watch the way the line is going — up for good, down for

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bad. If you then extend this line into the future, you can see your feelings about which direction your life is going in each of these categories. (You can add as many categories as you like, but these are the main ones.) If the trend of all, or any, of them is downwards, it means you should take a long look at this part of your life and decide how to change it for the better.
When I did this exercise, my work red line was falling off the bottom of the page at the 15-year mark. It was at that moment I knew that something had to change, and I could not rely on luck to change it for me. I made the changes - moved jobs, worked part-time and began my writing career - and the plan worked.
These were big changes but they do not have to be. Sometimes you simply need to sit down and look at a map of your life like this to accept that changes need to be made. They can range from a radical overhaul of your whole life to realizing you need to spend more time with friends and family. It does not matter, as long as you take the time to look and are prepared to make that change.
Draw a 5-10-15-year plan up and pin it in a prominent position. Then map out personal detailed goals and targets and notes about how you intend to achieve them. Focus on family and relationships, hobbies, personal and spiritual development, work and finances. Keep checking your progress.

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