Friday, August 6, 2010

Death to Lists (um, for now)

Last night I made the radical decision to call a moratorium on listmaking. For those of you who know me well, you know just how radical this is. I write to do lists for the day, week, month, season. Grocery lists. Things-to-remember-to-do-and-buy-when-I return-to-the-US lists. An Amazon wishlist. Write on my hand because "uh-oh i don't want to forget that" lists. Dreams and goals lists.
I'm exhausted.
So after a mostly glorious month (I say mostly because there were some uncomfortable adjustments to the sudden dawning of Matthieu's adolescence....), the kids left on Tuesday. And in the empty quiet of the house, I looked very deeply at how I was living my life.
And what I saw was that those lists were crushing the essence of my life energy. While, yes, they have an important function, to not forget important things, to be productive, to be efficient, they were so ruling me, I was so enslaved, that I had lost the creative flow of my own natural energy, my own beingness.
I decided that listmaking was a killjoy in my life. A pesticide that killed the wild growth of my soul.
So....I decided that today, for now, for the rest of this month of August, I will be a list-less(but hopefully not listless) fool surfing the waves of my own inspiration and intuition. Not to say that the health insurance forms don't need to get filed and the English classes prepped and the unemployment yaddah-yaddah yadded.
But I recognized my obsessive listmaking was based on a gaping fear. That there was no ground beneath me. That if I don't make the right decisions, on-time, in the right order, I will perish. A deep lack of trust in Life and Self.
So I am making a radical decision to Trust. And breathe.
And August, in a small town in the middle of nowhere, where they don't even sell calendars, when I'm only working 2 days a week, seems a pretty safe place and time to experiment with this.
Here's five things I feel about this...no just kidding, really, kind of...

1 comment:

  1. Ha ha! Your joke at the end, hilarious. It's great that you were able to recognize the anxiety created by living by lists. Makes me wonder about myself. My time is also very flexible, but I like having lists to keep me from wasting too much time. I don't always accomplish everything on the list (actually almost never), but it's a goal to shoot for. If I don't have a list, even if it's just in my head...what would happen? I'd...I don't know what I'd do. Keep us posted on what you learn. I might have to learn whatever it is, too.

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