The Laundry List
As the blank slate of January 1 approaches, our minds as if on auto-pilot shift to lists… An excerpt from “The Compost File:”
I’m not much of a New Year’s resolutions girl, but I do love lists. They erect borders around slippery things I’m afraid might slide away if I don’t step in and do my part to contain them. The ones in the notes on my phone, while a decent substitute when I’m on the go, don’t hold a candle to the real ones I make on the backs of envelopes—the ones that sometimes get re-written just so they can get checked off. Those carry gravitas in their etching.
That’s how stuff gets done.
It’s how the filter on the fridge gets fixed, the coat closet gets cleaned out, and the doctor’s appointment gets made. It’s how the dog gets fed, the oil gets changed, and the Bible gets read. My lists hold things that are really important, commingled with a bunch of stuff that really isn’t. Not in the grand scheme of things, anyway. They’re a hodgepodge of new thoughts and old reminders. A governor for days to be proud of when I lay my head on the pillow at night.
“How we spend our days is how we spend our lives,” said the brilliant writer, Annie Dillard. Our days, if graphed, would show up in messy, uneven layers as opposed to linear lines. While the peaks and valleys that mark our journey might not appear on the backs of random envelopes, the laundry list that does provides the girth. The story of our lives live there.
I once heard a tale about Michael Jordan—well after he had become MICHAEL JORDAN—playing in a pickup game back in North Carolina with some of the Tarheel players in the summer. The story goes that he angrily kicked a ball up into the rafters after his squad lost, prompting a guy on his team to mutter under his breath, “Geez. It’s a pickup game. It’s not that important.”
Jordan’s retort, as legend has it, was, “Important? Nah, it wasn’t important. But it mattered. (Insert a few choice words). Everything matters.”
The items on our laundry list are rarely important. They’re things we want to do or need to do, with “have to do” hardly ever factoring in. But they matter. They matter because typically they are things that make all the other things we do possible. They are the proverbial extrapolation of putting rocks in a jar. But they also matter because they make up our days.
A laundry list is a life plan with its sleeves rolled up. It has a tedious core.
Most things of significance do.
Jane Kenyan and the poet Donald Hall were married for twenty-three years. She was forty-seven when she died. He said: “If anyone had asked us, ‘Which year was the best, of your lives together?’ we could have agreed on an answer: ‘The one we remember least.’ There were sorrowful years—the death of her father, my cancers, her depressions—and there were also years of adventure: a trip to China and Japan, two trips to India; years when my children were married; years when the grandchildren were born... The best moment of our lives was one quiet, repeated day of work in our house. Not everyone understands.”
And even those who do, don’t usually realize it. Mundanity isn’t shiny, so it’s super easy to miss.
The laundry list gets us from Monday to Tuesday and January to December and down the road toward twenty-three years. Sometimes it houses the regimen of big dreams, sometimes the formation of new habits. But mostly, it’s just an intentional way of using the hours God gives us in a day.
We learn, over time, that the dull, sometimes tiresome activities of life are not merely items to check off once they are completed (though it feels quite good to do that). The matter matters, too.