To-Do The Impossible (Experiment #5)

An Experiment for a New Year

Tonight begins the celebration of Rosh Hashanah, the start of the Jewish new year. As a person who didn’t grow up Jewish, the timing of this holiday used to bug me. We’re just starting school and trying to get into some kind of post-summer groove over here! Now we have to stop everything and do all this holiday stuff?

But after spending nearly twenty High Holy Days with my husband and his family, I’ve come to enjoy the timing. Precisely because it calls me to pause at a fairly hectic time of life, invites me to step out of time with a small t in order to ponder Time with a big T, gifts me another chance to recall my fallibility and my deepest intentions for engaging with others in the coming year.

It was the idea of intentions that got me thinking about this new experiment. Well, it was the synergy between intentions and my currently monstrously long to-do list.

Photo by Eden Constantino on Unsplash

How do y’all feel about to-do lists? The to-do list and I have a history that runs very Ross and Rachel. (Sorry, my kids are on a “Friends” kick at the moment.)

First, we’re on-again. Fresh start, brand new system! Everything from here on out is going to be sunshine and daisies because now I’ll be a well-oiled machine of productive genius! Then before you know it, we’re off-again. Nothing’s changed! I’m still always “behind!” Mergh! And I’m left feeling betrayed and cynical.

And, no, I don’t need you to email me about your very useful Trello/Todoist/Post-it system. The truth is I’ve tried them all and the only thing that’s worked as I untangle my relationship with perfectionism, productivity and worthiness, is recognizing and reminding myself that it’s not the to-do list or the productivity system that’s “the problem.”

Rather, the problem is my tendency to turn this list, these words on a page or a screen, into a torturous worth-o-meter that I enlist to find “evidence” for the fact that I am a. incompetent b. a failed waste of human potential and c. therefore unworthy of kindness or nice things or anything good.

It’s not the poor list’s fault that I’ve been using it to conjure up a fantasy future-self that will DEFINITELY GO TO THE GYM EVERY SINGLE DAY AND DECLUTTER EVERY ROOM IN THE HOUSE SO MY FAMILY CAN EXPERIENCE THE WHOLESOME JOY OF MINIMALISM AND MAKE BREAD FROM SCRATCH AND ALSO SAVE THE DOLPHINS AND THE WHALES AND END CHILD HUNGER!

Then I craft a scarlet F for Failure to don when I don’t manage to hit the hottie/Martha Stewart/community-activist trifecta, in an effort to somehow shame myself into “doing better next time.”

I have lots of experiments to throw at my gnarly relationship with to-do lists. Because to-do lists will never not be a thing in my life until maybe I’m 87 and my list just says: Exist. Enjoy. (Though honestly, that should probably be my list now!)

Here’s an experiment I’m trying this month that I hope will help me experience some of the delight, awe, and ease I want to feel each day:

Step 1: Make your to-do list.

Step 2: Throw something both wonderful and impossible at the top.

• Fly to the moon

• Eat a cumulus cloud for breakfast

• Kiss Chris Hemsworth

At the very least, it’ll make you giggle, which is a fine antidote for the dread that can bubble up when tackling our to-do items.

Even better, it turns out that sometimes putting an impossible, ineffable, or fantastical item at the top of our to-do lists can spark magic.

A few years ago, I jotted “Locate Bliss” on my to-do list. Later that week, I sat in my living room and wrote the following: 

The peach ginger tea in my cup
is super-concentrated now.

Just the way I like it best,
thanks to a long steep time
over a heart-mending phone call,
during which I was able to be of genuine support to a friend in need.

Sun streaming through my backyard after torrential rain.
Warm socks on cold toes.
Two healthy kids.  (Dear Lord, thank you.)

Still breathing. In and out.

So hard to remember,
So easily found when we finally think
to look.

Bliss 
available to us all
in each and every moment.

You never know what you’ll find when you seek to-do the impossible. Will you try it with me in this new year?
(But I’m definitely not promising you’ll get a kiss from Chris Hemsworth.)