The Tyranny of Tomorrow

It was Shakespeare's Macbeth, who may have been the first literary figure to offer an argument on the virtue of planning your work and then working your plan when he offered, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day..."

In addition to its eloquence, it's memorable for both its utility and applicability-though in an era of diminished expectations and shortened attention spans it's easy to understand how quickly we can seem to get lost as individuals and as political units from cities to our national government.

There's always more than one way to get from here to tomorrow. The more successful paths seem to often involve inspiration and perspiration in nearly equal amounts, that is, a brilliant insight or an original idea combined with hard work. And don't forget some good luck.

My father was fond of invoking the Pennsylvania Dutch as the source of one of his favorite expressions "the harder I work, the luckier I get" but I defer to wherever your mom or dad say they heard it, too. Luck, like hope, is a four letter word and both of them have that in common with a plan. But critical to any plan are having definite, precise and clearly defined goals with a strategy of how to use the tools at your disposal to achieve those goals.

Without all of that, a plan is just a wish you make with your heart. And while that worked out very well for Jiminy Cricket, we're having a critical shortage of wishing stars right now so we'll have to make do the old-fashioned way. For what it's worth, don't take Pinocchio to any of the seafood nights at local restaurants, at least not for the next few weeks.

There's been enough words written on "how get ___ back on track" where we each insert the name of where we live, step two paces back and admire our handiwork seldom realizing that a good beginning is only that, a beginning.

Articulating a plan means making sure that everyone who needs to be on board with it, and that usually means everyone where you live, understands what you're sharing, the reasons for what you're proposing, the impact of the sacrifices they will need to make for a common good and then to get on board with the program and own the plan for themselves. All or nothing at all.

Top down, bottom up, there's no one path because there's no one destination-only a journey that has a beginning of each day and never ends. The only constant in our world has always been change and the need for change. There's never an end to progress-only pauses along the way and no matter what happened yesterday, tomorrow will be here in a moment and care not about those successes and failures. We can learn from them and we can build on them but we can't live forever on their memory or their meaning. As Banquo admonishes, "if you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak." Far too often, all that remains is silence.

-bill kenny