Master of Lists

A. Do Laundry
B. Read "Dead Until Dark"
C. Stretch
D. Balance checkbook
E. Compose new blog entry
F. Trim fingernails

Hmmm, this list is a rather typical one for me, I would say, but it lacks something. There's just not enough fun in there. Unless you consider stretching fun. I find it satisfying, but not exactly fun. No, the fun is the reading and writing the new blog entry (yes, that's what I'm doing right now...). Well, if I stick in there "Watch movie on AMC while eating dinner" which is what I did, I guess that evens things out.

So yes, I keep lists. How long have I been doing it? I have no idea. I remember making lists of things in college back in the 1980s. But those were lists of favorite Kansas songs, possible titles for poems (I wrote a ton of poems during high school and college), snacks I wanted to buy to restock the tiny refrigerator I shared with my dorm roommate. And then during the summer when I had a job in a warehouse packing summer lunches for the public parks, my lists would be of what rock albums I wanted to buy, what novels I should read that I had drooled at during the school year when I saw them at my work-study job in the library.

Some time in the 90s, in one of my law-firm jobs, I discovered that Microsoft Word included among its many little quirky symbols two kinds of boxes that you can put a check in - one you can actually check, and the other you can put an "x" in. That x box revolutionized my list-building. Suddenly, I could make tables of lists: one column in outline form listing my proposed tasks, and another column to the left of it filled with x boxes that I could check off once I started finishing these tasks. Oh, the sense of accomplishment I received when I could check off something. It might be "eat breakfast". Or it might be "iron shirts for the week." But large or small, simple or complicated, mundane or profound, pleasurable or arduous, putting an x in a box was a marvelous thing.

I had not really traveled much, but several years ago when I started to take traveling more seriously, I discovered a whole new use for my lists: planning my vacations, building itineraries. I would study travel guides, look up details on the Internet, and slowly a plan would emerge. All the steps taking me from packing in my room to checking into the airport to checking into my hotel halfway around the world, and then the same thing reversed at the end of the trip. It gives me a feeling of security, to have an idea of what comes next. And I don't have to ask anyone else, "what comes next?" In fact, when there is someone else with me, I'm the one they ask "what comes next?" and I know the answer, and if I don't remember the answer, I just look at my itinerary. I look at my list. I go down the list to the next unchecked box scan across, and that is what is next.

Getting to this level of fastidious list-building may sound rather anal-retentive, or at least unimaginative. But in recent times I have discovered another beautiful thing about lists. Once I have gathered all the things that could possibly happen, I am free to toss all those things aside and do something completely different. Or maybe just do one thing, or two things, out of 5 or 10 on the list. The list gives me all the information I need at my disposal, just in case I can't think of what to do at that moment. It's a safety net. But when I do have the presence of mind to make something up on the spot, I can forgo my safety net. My boxes, at day's end, may remain woefully unchecked. And I will still have a feeling of accomplishment, of having lived a richly satisfying day.