Did you know that there is actually scientific evidence that the act of crossing off items on a “to-do” list triggers feelings of pleasure and well-being in the brain? Did you also know that there are over 200 MILLION hits on Google about
making “to-do lists”? 200 MILLION HITS. Do you know what that means? It means we're all a bunch of list junkies.
But like any other addiction, there comes a time when too much is just, well, too much. Case in point, my good friend Diana, who recently succumbed to the lure of the list and found herself trapped in a literary limbo.
Diana and I have always been two peas in a pod. We've always shared a similar sense of humor. But more than anything, we've bonded over books. Big books. Little books. Tall books. Short books. Old books. New books. Books. Books. Books. You name it, we'd read it. But she took me one further, for she'd read a cereal box if that's all there was (and she'd
like it).
One night last winter, Diana and I were celebrating her birthday at our favorite restaurant. I remember it was bitterly cold outside. It was one of those nights where you could hear the sound of sleet slapping against the window panes of our corner booth, as if drawn to the light and the warmth within. I was savoring the heady mix of sizzling fajitas and frozen margaritas, when suddenly the evening took a wrong turn into a really BAD neighborhood.
For it was then that Diana put me on notice. Seems she'd found a list somewhere called “Books You Must Read Before You Die” and was slowly—
painfully—making her way through it with a dogged determination usually reserved for preparing a tax return. See, she had come to realize that if she lived to be 75 years old and read one book per week, that meant she “only” had one thousand, eight hundred and twenty books to read before she died. And, by God, she did NOT intend to waste her quota on what she called “crap” (and I'm guessing that meant no more perusal of the Wheaties Times for her). Wah wah...
Well, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Idly stirring the melting ice in my now-empty glass, I couldn't help wondering what she would do if she
finished the list and still had 20 years left to live? What then? Paging Dr. Kevorkian...
But in all seriousness, this was
depressing. Her passion for reading had become a chore, even as her life had become one big “to-do” list. And it wasn't even
her list! She was stuck in an endless literary loop, trying repeatedly to get through
Finnegan's Wake and hating every minute of it. But she couldn't just stop reading it and move on to something she actually enjoyed, oh no, because
Finnegan's Wake, you see, was on “THE LIST” (and let's be honest, why
else would anyone be reading it??).
My heart sank. Diana had become one of
them: One of those people who toe the line of conformity, ignoring her own path to follow that of some arbitrary third party. It was a real “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” moment. I silently screamed that I wanted whomever had replaced my book-loving friend with this
android to GIVE HER BACK!! I sensed we had reached a crossroads in our reading lives. You could almost feel the fissure form between us.
What had happened to my longtime friend? Whatever it was, I hoped it wouldn't happen to me too!
And then I realized that to some degree, it already
had happened to me. Because somewhere along the way, much of the joy and spontaneity of life had been swept away and buried under a tidal wave of “responsibility” and needing to “accomplish” things with my time. But it wasn't always that way.
When I was a kid, my friends and I used to spend hours telling each other ghost stories, thrilling to the goosebumps on our arms and the toasted marshmallows stuck to our fingers. We'd catch fireflies in the warm summer dusk, watching in wonder as they'd light up in the glass jar we kept for such special occasions. We'd ride our bikes to nowhere, speeding as fast as we could pump the pedals, just to feel the wind on our faces.
Life was all about being in the moment.
But it seems the further we get from childhood, the more regimented our lives become as we strive to keep free-form thought at bay. We are forever planning ahead or looking behind.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more I realize that my friend Diana really isn't that unusual. Scary, isn't it? I mean, let's face it: We're all a little “list-crazy”. From an early age, we worry over our Christmas lists for months on end. Even God Himself was a list-maker, the Ten Commandments being the ultimate “NOT-do” list. I'm actually beginning to think that there's an unspoken 11th commandment, that being “Thou shalt make a list and check it twice”.
Everywhere, we are inundated with evidence of humanity's need to synthesize and categorize: Best-seller lists. Best-dressed lists. Worst-dressed lists. Most eligible lists. Fortune 500 lists. Craig's List. There's a list for the “most annoying words” (there should be one for the most annoying lists). And the mother of all guilt-trips: The to-do list.
Celebrities are on the A-List, B-List, C-List or D-List (whose only inhabitant seems to be Kathy Griffin). There are “wish lists” we can compile online to remind ourselves what it is we
really want, and then we share our lists with other listmakers on Listmania.
And if all that's not enough, there's even a BOOK of lists (I wonder if it's on the list of books to read before you die?).
Even the words we use every day speak volumes about our fear of living “off the list”: If a company is performing poorly, it will be DE-listed from the stock exchange. If we have no energy, we are list-LESS (literally, we have no list (whatever
that means)!!).
What is with all this list-making and our cosmic place on “the list”? We're forever pushing our way to the goal line, with the goal line forever being pushed back by the addition of new tasks to our to-do list. But are we even really making our
own lists? Or are we, like my friend Diana, letting others define our goals and standards
for us? We've all seen those lists of "Places to visit before we die"; "Movies to see before we die". Even the articles that seem on the surface to be about taking control of your own life are based on socially-defined goals rather than personal joys.
That's not to say that there's anything wrong with lists in moderation, of course. After all, they can help keep us organized, anchor us when we might otherwise float aimlessly. But lists can also make our lives too rigid, too regimented, and too restricting. Look at my friend Diana. She had transformed something that had been a great source of joy in her life (reading) and turned it into the literary equivalent of the Bataan death march: One thousand six hundred and forty-two books to go before I die;... Nine hundred and seventy-three books to go before I die; Four hundred and fifty-two books to go before I die;.... I don't know about you, but that doesn't inspire me to read. If anything, it just makes me want to run out and enlist (or not).
It's great to be goal-oriented, but we need to find a balance point, taking the time for some “off-list” living. For in the end, it's not just about
what we do but
who we are. And how can we really know who we are if we don't follow our own intuition once in a while? Open ourselves up to the joys of the unplanned moment, like a windchime caught in a summer breeze?
A few weeks after my dinner with Diana, I found myself in a Barnes & Noble. I noticed a small table on the first floor with a sign that read “thought-provoking books”. (The IMPLIED list.) Around the table stood three or four silent, unsmiling customers who were scanning book jackets, presumably looking to have their thoughts provoked.
After my initial reaction of disbelief that there could only be
one table's worth of books in this 3-story building deemed able to provoke thought, I thought of my friend Diana, plowing through her unhappy list of books. And I walked
past that table and proudly into the “cheap and mindless” section.
I would decide what I found thought-provoking, letting my intuition be my guide. I was living off-list, if only for a moment.
On some level, I think Diana would have approved.
