When my line manager

asks me about my development plan

and where I see myself

in one, three or five years time

 

I begin to think how in a year

I would like to be painting watercolours

beside a mountain stream

somewhere in the Bavarian Alps

 

in three years eating cantaloupe

and drinking black coffee

on an early morning

in a European city I don't yet know

reading the final pages of

In Search of Lost Time

or Alan Moore's Jerusalem

or any other book I've told

people I've read over the years

but never have.

 

While in five years,

well who knows about five years,

but perhaps immersed

in a course of silent retreat

in an attempt to finally evaporate the ego

and nullify the self

 

but I don’t say this

or the likely truth,

that I will still be at this desk

looking at it’s same view

of car park, clouds and birds

just as I was one, three

and five years ago...

 

Instead I blow the dust

off a well practiced script,

a fudge of corporate maxims

personal development speak,

that ensures I am defining a personal vision

to become fully self actualised

at some point in the future

 

and while doing so begin to notice

a part of myself close off,

as if the inner being that we associate

with our true self

(what the Buddhists call the Atman

Or the One True Self)

can no longer bear to listen

and has clocked off

 

instead I have begun

to recall something I read

about the Atlantic Salmon,

who in the course of a 6,000 mile life journey

spends his last years on the planet

swimming 200 miles upstream

in order to spawn in the waters

where he once started

 

or the North American wood Frog

who survives sub zero winters

with only the antifreeze

of urinary waste to warm him

 

and then there’s the common swift,

who travels three thousand miles

to winter in the warm winds of North Africa

and then, in one nature's seemingly more

pointless displays of survival,

returns the following spring.