The Laundry List

I’m not much of a New Year’s resolutions girl.  But I do love lists. They sort of erect borders around slippery things that 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 re-arranged. Those carry gravitas in their etching. 

That’s how stuff gets done.

That’s how the filter on the fridge gets fixed and the coat closet gets cleaned out and the doctor’s appointment gets made. It’s how the dog gets fed and the oil gets changed and the Bible gets read. My lists hold stuff that is really important comingled with a bunch of stuff that really isn’t.  Not in the great scheme of things anyway. It’s a hodgepodge of new thoughts and old reminders. A rudder for days to be proud of when I lay my head on the pillow at night.

Annie Dillard once said, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.” And our lives, were our days to be graphed, would show up in messy, uneven layers as opposed to linear lines. The peaks and valleys might not appear on the back of the envelopes, but the laundry list provides the girth. The story of our lives is there.

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I once heard a tale about Michael Jordan-- well after he had become MICHAEL JORDAN-- playing in a pick-up 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, and a guy on his team muttered under his breath, “Geez. It’s a pick-up 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.”

I think Friedrich Nietzsche actually said that first, but it’s way more romantic and palpable when attributed to Michael Jordan. 

Most of the items on our laundry lists would rarely be deemed 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. 

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List making has become a national pastime. Barnes and Noble carries The Book of Lists, The New Book of Lists,  The Book of Book Lists-- just to name a few. There’s a Listology book, a Listology blog, a Listology podcast, a Listology twitter account. Some people, it seems, are obsessed.  But a laundry list isn’t a production of like things ranked in order or gathered items sprinkled in publishable glitter.  A laundry list is a life plan with its sleeves rolled up.  It has a tedious core.

Most things of significance do.

The poet Donald Hall, reflecting on his marriage to the love of his life, says that lasting love hinges on the mundane, the dailiness of doing life between the peaks and the valleys:

“Jane Kenyan and I were married for twenty-three years…She was forty-seven when she died.  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 also years of adventure: a trip to China and Japan, two trips to India; year 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 at the time. 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 most times it’s just an intentional way of using the hours God gave us in a day. 

And we learn, over time, that the dull, sometimes tiresome activities of life are not just items to check off once they are completed (though it feels quite good to do that), they are the living. 

P.S. Otherwise