I am so enjoying reading Patricia Hampl’s The Art of the Wasted Day. Early in the book, page 18, she records one of her many to-do lists. She says first that she admires Montaigne, know as the father of the personal essay, for his ability to be rather than strive. He didn’t think of himself as a professional literary man, but one who was tossing unbidden thoughts for his own interest. However, a modern and conscientious woman, Hampl struggles with the idea of doing that before she makes her daily to-do list:

Return overdue books

Mammo appt

Mustard, garlic, milk (skim), bananas

Letters of rec: Greg, Jeff, Susan…who else???

Blurbs (3 – actually read the books to the end)

Flowers to GK (mother’s death—or was it father . . .

            ask Ellen

Ants in kitchen. Traps? Poison? Hardware store?

Fish oil (helps against aging—Sue)

Overcoats to Goodwill

Czech phrasebook for G (leaves Monday)

Memoir ms. from Montreal paralytic (bottom right

            pile – READ/RESPOND

Furnace inspection (ticking sound)

Rose wilt (ask Joan? Judith?)

Check to Refugee Sanctuary (how much?)

Geraniums and sprengeri fern for the graves

Deadline

Dentist

Dish soap

Dog food

“This organization, (or attempt at organization),” she says, “is meant to sweep away all the dumb tasks of the day so that Real Life can be lived. Real life? What comes after dog food?”

She calls this list and ones like it “the flotsam of endeavor, failure and success.” Like Montaigne, she wants to enter the “daydream life, that prairie of possibility cherished from childhood, and beyond that into my delicious time-wasting youth—all that has been junked up with . . . with what? Reality? Life as it really is and must be for an adult?”

Oh, my, how she makes me thirst to give up my extensive to-do lists. Instead, I have rewritten my current list to add parenthetical information as she has:

return one package of lights to Amazon, find out my credit limit

Costco: return two items, buy more yakisoba

turn in expired meds to sheriff (have to bring them in their original bottles?)

Resistbot.com

garden hoses (coil and find a place for them) and weed wack and mow

download King County Rider Trip Planner Application (want to take the bus

instead of driving everywhere in Seattle)

call or email car dealer service (why doesn’t my gear shift light up the way it did before they replaced the part that kept me from getting into park to take my key from the ignition—write about how I’d have to keep the car running so the battery wouldn’t wear down—is that me as I am during my days?)

I see from the last item added today after reading Hampl for a bit, that I might consider my to-do lists as more than to-do lists. I have already often retyped and rewritten them because I don’t like seeing all the items I’ve highlighted calling out to me, “YOU HAVE GOT TO GET TO THEM TODAY THOUGH YOU CAN’T START YOUR DAY WITHOUT EMPTYING YOUR BRAIN OF ALL THE OTHER ITEMS ON YOUR LIST THAT YOU CAN’T POSSIBLY ACCOMPLISH EVEN IN ONE WEEK! HA, HA!,” I shout at myself (and by the way, it is official now that we read all caps as shouting).

Now maybe I can see the lists as both the “flotsam of endeavor” from having to act as an adult in our society and, perhaps, also as note-taking for poems or personal essays (maybe successful or maybe not but interesting to write anyway) or sometimes, to impress the Hampl I’ve imbibed through the gorgeous writing in her book, just as metaphor note-taking (the kind of fun I am most capable of—finding metaphors for my experience from my daily life).

My husband is one who truly entertains his thoughts.

I will say, “But you know there are books written about this,” and he will say, “I don’t really want an answer. I just want to think about the problem.”

It still is something I don’t understand. Don’t you have to “do something” with everything?

“If you are going to serve your thoughts coffee and cheesecake or treat them to a barbeque dinner, don’t you want to know the answer?”

“That’s like the misguided idea men sometimes have about taking a woman out for dinner and expecting sex afterward,” I imagine as his retort.

And, according to Hampl, he is right not to want or push for an answer. Taking in the mind’s delights can be the flight of one thought after another like birds lifting off a telephone wire, one, than another and then many. This state of thinking can keep thoughts as awesome as a spider web that glistens with dew, a creation of its own kind that you don’t want to break into but want just to admire.

How often do we let ourselves not endeavor but experience and delight in the world that comes in through our senses and our mishmash of thoughts?

Is list making too linear to allow us this pleasure?

Or can a list help us admire and not search? Or find a way to explore what we are experiencing or wondering about or delighting in without worrying about what the answer is? Can a list save us from judgement and allow us to be in a moment with what is around us or what we are remembering at that moment? I can’t say I am sure, but as a list maker, I am hopeful.

Here is a writing exercises to consider trying (oh,—“to try” not “to be,” already a striving, but hey, it seems a definite paradox we can’t really get away from—how we must absorb in order to write and how while writing we synthesize our experiences and they are metabolized into words and then feel accomplished). At a minimum, it seems to me that we can use lists as a way of slowing down and letting in, perhaps entertaining ideas that are idiosyncratic and end up being universal.

This exercise comes from the popular musical Fiddler on the Roof, a moving high school production of which I saw recently at my grandson’s high school in Seattle.

You remember the song (and if you’d like to hear the Broadway tune click on the link and open the YouTube video on the top left).

If I Were A Rich Man

Dear God, you made many, many poor people.
I realize, of course, that it’s no shame to be poor
But it’s no great honor, either.
So what would have been so terrible if I had a small fortune?

If I were a rich man,
Daidle deedle daidle
Daidle daidle deedle daidle dumb

All day long I’d biddy-biddy-bum
If I were a wealthy man
I wouldn’t have to work hard,
Daidle deedle daidle
Daidle daidle deedle daidle dumb

If I were a biddy-biddy rich,
Daidle deedle daidle daidle man

I’d build a big tall house with rooms by the dozen
Right in the middle of the town,
A fine tin roof with real wooden floors below.
There would be one long staircase just going up
And one even longer coming down,
And one more leading nowhere, just for show.

I’d fill my yard with chicks and turkeys and geese
And ducks for the town to see and hear,
Squawking just as noisily as they can,
And each loud
“pa-pa-geeee! pa-pa-gaack! pa-pa-geeee! pa-pa-gaack!”
Would land like a trumpet on the ear,
As if to say, “Here lives a wealthy man.”
Oy!

If I were a rich man,
Daidle deedle daidle
Daidle daidle deedle daidle dumb

All day long I’d biddy-biddy-bum
If I were a wealthy man

I wouldn’t have to work hard,
Daidle deedle daidle
Daidle daidle deedle daidle dumb

If I were a biddy-biddy rich,
Daidle deedle daidle daidle man.

I see my wife, my Golde,
Looking like a rich man’s wife,
With a proper double chin,
Supervising meals to her heart’s delight.

I see her putting on airs
And strutting like a peacock,
Oy! What a happy mood she’s in,
Screaming at the servants day and night.

The most important men in town will come to fawn on me
They will ask me to advise them,
Like a Solomon the Wise
“If you please, Reb Tevye?”
“Pardon me, Reb Tevye?”
Posing problems that would cross a rabbi’s eyes
Ya va voy, ya va voy voy vum

And it won’t make one bit of difference
If I answer right or wrong
When you’re rich they think you really know.

If I were rich, I’d have the time that I lack
To sit in the synagogue and pray,
And maybe have a seat by the Eastern wall,
And I’d discuss the learned books with the holy men
Seven hours every day
That would be the sweetest thing of all
Oy!

If I were a rich man,
Daidle deedle daidle
Daidle daidle deedle daidle dumb

All day long I’d biddy-biddy-bum
If I were a wealthy man.

I wouldn’t have to work hard,
Daidle deedle daidle
Daidle daidle deedle daidle dumb

Lord who made the lion and the lamb,
You decreed I should be what I am
Would it spoil some vast, eternal plan,
If I were a wealthy man?

***

What “if” might you use in the title of your list? What sounds might you put in your list just for fun? Sound is a wonderful way to experience without having to know why or what you will use your impressions for.

Repeat the “If” phrase you’ve used in the title whenever you need to so you can find more to list. Repetition works that way—it prompts us to new thoughts.

Of course, your list doesn’t have to be as long as this song’s.

Be silly; be sad; be thoughtful; be beside the point if you want. Entertain yourself!

Come back to what you’ve written in a few days to see what you might like to write from. I bet there’s something. And I bet some of the lines you’ve written in the list will be impressions that you will savor (and use in later writing!) Strivers we writers are—looking for the writing that seems, as Muriel Rukeyser wrote, always to have been in existence.