On the pastime of todolisting

Whew, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted! It’s partly that I’m in a covid time warp, I suppose. Also I had an article I was planning to post in the summer, but decided it wasn’t ready for publication. These days I’m spending a lot of time working on my novel – with multiple writing dates every week to support that — much gratitude to my writing buddies!!

Here’s a snippet from today’s “Morning Pages” that I felt moved to share:

She collected ‘to do’ items like curios. They filled her list like snow globes or inherited china crowding a cabinet. She occasionally took them down to dust and rearrange them. When an item had newly arrived, there was a greater chance she would actually do the task, and check it off quickly, as if she, or the item, had realized it didn’t belong in her collection. But once one had been on the to do list for a while it tended to stay there, part of the accretions of fleeting desires into the sediment of someday maybes that formed the bedrock of the list. Once in a while, while curating the collection, she’d find a task that felt forgotten, or newly urgent, and she’d pluck it out and lift it up to the top, where it had some air and a chance of finding its wings. Or sometimes she would Just Do It.