Managing life or living it?

I’ve always been a list-maker of tasks I have to do. When life grows busy, the list is a way to have control over what threatens to become chaos. While I was teaching, I would have multiple lists: a “to-do” list for each of my five classes; a list of household tasks that needed accomplishing; and eventually, a list of needs to take care of for my parents. I found great satisfaction in crossing items off these lists, but an equal amount of angst in the items I didn’t finish and didn’t cross off. Like Toad in the the book Frog and Toad Together, I would even add and cross off something on a list that I had completed but which wasn’t originally on the list, just to make myself feel more” accomplishful,” a word often used in my family.

Sometimes lists hung around for a long, long time, with one persnickety item that I just couldn’t get done. I would not transfer that item to a new list, because it signified some degree of incompetence or procrastination that I didn’t want to acknowledge. I realize I come by this list-making honestly from my father, who carried a small spiral notebook in his shirt pocket with lists of things to do. His lists, and mine, helped to organize our lives and were necessary stays against confusion and lack of control.

I still make lists, and love the satisfaction of doing all the things that I’ve set out to do and crossing off items one by one. But I have also realized that there is a certain tyranny in a list that constrains life and may even prevent the pursuit of a more spontaneous, creative life. Who, for example, would write down “watch the birds” on a to-do list? Or “become absorbed in a good book and read all day?” Or “decide to write a blog post?” Because I don’t write things like these on lists, when I end up doing them, I feel guilty, somehow, that they weren’t “on the list” of things to do that day. I’m guessing there are others who experience this same feeling, because when I posted on facebook the other day that I had accomplished very little but had read a lot, more people “liked” that post than just about anything else I have ever posted.

So in talking to myself about my life as a retired person, and trying to be more present in the moment, I have decided to stop thinking of my lists as “to-do lists” and to start thinking of them as simply a list of “possibilities” for the day. In a way, this actually helps me to feel less overwhelmed by any of the many “to-dos” that a single individual needs to carry out in order to keep some semblance of order inside and outside the house. It also frees me up to do whatever I feel like doing in the moment, without feeling hugely guilty about other things on the list which are going undone.

In the story “The List,” Toad is paralyzed when his list blows away and he can’t remember what else was on his list of things to do. I don’t want to be that person (that Toad?) I will still be the person who makes a list for the day, but whether I choose to do one thing or no thing from that list, at the end of the day, I will be grateful for the way that life unfolds, offering surprises and accomplishments, things I can cross off and things that I can’t.