Member-only story
If you’re reading this, you survived the holidays yet again. Congratulations.
I’ve spent the last month planning the next year: Daily checklists, weekly checklists, monthly checklists, a prioritized list of drop-dead-due dates, creative goals, lifetime goals, and yet another checklist of resolutions that, like the items on every other list, accumulate every year and never get done. There are separate lists for health, home repair, parenting, and networking, to name just a few. The lists swell over time and give birth to sublists and sub-sublists, but still occupy only a few kilobytes of space on my phone, laptop, desktop, or wherever else I can put them, leaving plenty of space for even more lists. Pre-internet-era creature of habit that I am, I will often scribble a plan for the next hour on a sticky note so as not to sink too deeply into the electronic-list swamp.
It occurs to me that it would be easier to simply die than trying to accomplish all of these goddamned things on all of these goddamned lists. This idea comes much more readily than the idea that “perhaps the world will not end if I simply fail to accomplish some (or even most) of these things.” In fact, in my original draft of this column, I started that last sentence with the word “naturally” instead of “it occurs to me,” because it seems so natural that it didn’t strike me as unnatural until I put it in writing.
