June Reflection - On Plans and Planning

Hannah Buckland July 3, 2017, 5 comments

[It's been a while since I provided a blathering reflection.  So here you go!  Blathering today about Future Ready struggles and my unintended Minnesota existence.]

In late December 2013, I relocated to northern Minnesota with a plan: I would stay two years--no more; no less--and then I would leave.  I would not buy furniture because furniture, in my mind, means permanence.  I would not buy winter boots because I wouldn’t need them long enough to make the expense worthwhile.  I would not indulge in local hobbies like ice-fishing or curling, nor would I develop a taste for lutefisk.  And, most of all, I would not--I absolutely would not!--allow myself to feel settled in northern Minnesota.  Boxes of dishes and clothes and books and bedding are heavy enough, especially when carrying them alone, gradually wearing a path across the lawn between front door and car door.  I didn’t want to lift the additional weight of that particular kind of ache that comes around every time we leave behind another place we’ve called home.

But this reflection is supposed to be about Future Ready, so I’ll say this: Plans have a way of changing.  Never mind the details, but between this and that and some other things, the plans I had for my library’s Future Ready project are not coming together as I’d anticipated.  With Leech Lake Gaming as my partner, we’d planned to host a series of digital storytelling workshops and mini Leech Lake Tribal College courses to youth enrolled in their summer Youth Development Program.  Beyond hoping the students might enroll at LLTC after high school, we’d wanted to spark creativity and curiosity, encouraging each student to leave with a renewed sense of what’s possible.  But on the LLTC side of things, even after a month and a half of work, pieces are still missing.  I’m deliberate in my vagueness here, but suffice it to say the experience of watching my plan crumble in my own hands has been demoralizing, and yet I’m reluctant to let the project go.

The decision to plan requires us to accept a certain amount of ambiguity and risk: We do not know what obstacles and opportunities may reroute us, and though we try otherwise, we cannot expect the unexpected.  But, in general, plans are not contractual obligations; they are part of an iterative and reflective process.  When my self-imposed two-year Minnesota deadline arrived, I did what I promised myself I wouldn’t do: I stayed.  Staying wasn’t a byproduct of procrastination or the result of a bleak job market; it was a very real, very conscious decision I made, one that was almost as difficult as my original decision to move north.  I’ve adhered strictly to my no-lutefisk-no-ice-fishing-no-curling policy, but in my original plan, I hadn’t known Minnesota would be so good to me, and it seemed ungrateful to walk away from this goodness, to choose a timeline devised years ago over the reality of living here now.  My change in plans wasn’t flaky or unreliable; it was strategic.

The thing about changing plans, though, is that it isn’t necessarily easy.  While our brains can be very strategic, our hearts can be equally as vocal in their emotional outbursts.  Trying to let the strategic in, I’ve been tinkering with some elements of my Future Ready project plans--especially with the scope and timeline--but I’m still reluctant to let go of the project altogether.  I’ve settled on this idea of working with Gaming and their youth program, and as with all places we settle, there’s a certain pull that keeps me here even as mounting evidence indicates this all may fail.  But I feel more optimistic when I take a moment to reflect on the work my staff and I have done to reach this point--not starting in January 2017 when Future Ready began but even farther back, back when the library was in a crowded 900-square-foot room, back before we had any children’s books, back when we couldn’t even fathom community programs because we were so preoccupied with trying to survive the day-to-day.  Though I’ve never partnered with Gaming prior or coordinated this kind of partnered youth program, I’ve still been here before, in this place where decisions are difficult and plans keep changing and an ambiguous future is approaching too quickly.  Maybe we won’t be able to carry out this project as we’d planned, but eventually, we’ll stumble into another idea and settle into a new plan based in part on the lessons we’re learning now.

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