The Five Year Question

I am sure everyone has struggled with this question at some point or the other in their lives - "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?"

I have tried hard to prepare an appropriate response to this for more than 10 years now, and I am even further from an answer than I was when I first started (preparing for campus recruitment at the end of engg). Thank goodness that I was never asked this question as I have this extreme compulsion for honesty in interviews (which meant generally poor viva marks) and I did not want to come across as someone who had no idea of what she wanted, leave alone a 5 year plan of getting there.

I would definitely like to ask the interviewer if they were anywhere near where they had planned to be 5 years ago. Frankly, when I look back and pick up any 5 years of my life after engg college, I have never done what I had assumed to be doing then. When I passed out and started working, I had never thought I would write CAT and change my course of life with an MBA. When I finally started living with my dad and taking care of him post MBA, I clearly told my boss that I was focused on remaining offshore and I had never thought I would finally leave my dad and move out of the country long term. And as I grew older (and supposedly matured) and started accepting the fact that remaining single was not an option for me (given that I was a product of my culture), I had never thought that I would willingly marry a guy I did not know at all and embark on the biggest adventure of my already adventurous life and change its course yet again. 

And all of this is post engg, assuming that prior to degree, you have the uncertainty of getting admitted to a preferred college and then job in a preferred location. Even before that, when you would normally go to school in the same city throughout (unless your dad had a transferable job or you lived in a rural area), I changed schools multiple times, even though neither condition was true for me.

When I ponder the question of "Fate" and where it takes us, I do know that lives change when we least expect it. But, I wonder, are there people who did, in fact, actually reach the place where they had imagined themselves 5 years earlier, both from a personal and professional perspective? And I am not including deaths, because that would make the equation impossible. Of course, now that I live an isolated life, I do not get to observe any lives closely and I do not know the answer. But, I do wonder and wish I could get some answers.

As an experiment, I am going to write what I think I will be doing after 5 years and what is the probability of its actually happening. I will revisit this post after 3 or 5 years and see how my life plan turned out.

1. I will be married and to the same person.  - highly probable

2. I will be living in the United States.   - highly probable

3. I will move out of Austin.   - probable

4. I will revisit Europe.   -unlikely

5. I will be working.    - highly probable

6. I will be a Business Analyst.    - probable

7. I will go back to school to take at least one course.    -unlikely or probable

8. I will be a mother.   - highly probable

9. I will not lose more friends to distance and time.    - unlikely

10. I will still be blogging.    - probable 

Well, I do hope no 10 is right and I remember this experiment when the time comes to revisit!

Tail Piece:

Of all my life plans, the consistent one used to be happiness but I was never able to decide whether I had, in fact, reached the elusive state ever or not. And then, I realized that happiness is a choice we need to make and there is something to be said for our culture's focus on duty and contentment. At least, I don't have to struggle with that anymore. Given that, it is ironical that I live in a country where "pursuit of happiness" is a right and refuses to recognize that the more you pursue it, the more elusive it is!