Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.

Alice: I don’t much care where…

Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.

Lewis Carroll’s story of the little girl whose innocent choices led her on a wild and fantastic journey fraught with challenge and hazard can be seen as a cautionary tale about caring where you are going. If you don’t care, nothing matters. As the less literary and more succinct Yogi Berra put it, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” But you had better be prepared for a wild ride.

Last month, Newtown’s public schools implemented a strategic plan that shows that the community cares very much about where it is going — or more precisely, where its children are going. The plan grew out of a year of work by residents and educators, seeking to get everyone working toward the school district’s overall mission “to inspire each student to excel in attaining and applying knowledge, skills and attributes that lead to personal success while becoming a contributing member of a dynamic global community.” (How would Yogi have put it?)

These goals may be lofty and distant, but the real value of the plan as a roadmap will be found in the journey, not the destination. As Superintendent of Schools Janet Robinson explained to the school board, “It causes us to focus.” In an age where the currency of concentration is too often counted out in the small change of Twitter tweets, blogger buzz, and one-liners, focus is a rare and valuable denomination. When a school system establishes mutual commitments and expectations, as Newtown’s has, it is focus that spots the child who is falling behind. It is focus that identifies the potential of the child who is bright but bored. It is focus that attends every step of every child along the way to fulfilling those commitments and expectations.

In the local election campaign this year, “strategic planning” is itself part of the buzz. The phrase has become the shorthand used to express everything from dissatisfaction of the status quo to a validation of it. Whatever it is we are talking about, let’s chalk it up to poor planning or great planning and vow to correct or continue the process. Presto! We’re all in favor of strategic planning.

The only problem with playing out an election campaign somewhere 5, 10, or 20 years over the horizon is that we avoid talking about the present where every future moment meets reality. Yes, let’s agree on where we hope to go, but let’s also focus on the next step, and the next, where competence and imagination pay immediate dividends.

We already know that one person’s vision is another person’s blindness. And sometimes it is the same person. A town meeting in 2001 approved a vision and a $21 million plan to purchase and develop Fairfield Hills. Advocates pushed the plan for the sake of Newtown’s future over the objections of a few lonely voices who thought there were too few details in that plan to justify the expense. The irony is that some of the leading proponents of the expenditure in 2001 who exhorted the people of Newtown “to share the vision with us,” are now among the leading critics of how things have turned out at Fairfield Hills. That was eight years ago. Plans and people change.

As we mature as a town and our politics become more combative and agonistic, we can expect contention in establishing long-range plans and even more contention in their interpretation once they are established. It may seem like the Mad Hatter’s tea party, but we need to embrace the process because as Superintendent Robinson says, it causes us to focus. It challenges our competence and imagination. And it reminds us that we care very much about where we are going.