What Must You Do or You Will Die?

“Never confuse movement with action.” – Ernest Hemingway

I don’t remember ever being this busy. Not even that time in the fourth grade when I was starring as Johnny Appleseed in our class play, learning to play the autoharp, and simultaneously creating my report on Missouri, the “Show Me” state, in a cardboard box panorama (I believe the Latin term for it is “Cardboardorama®”). Remember that fantastic technology?, those stories drawn on long paper rolled between two dowels inside a box decorated to look like a TV set; it was like watching the merry history of those stubborn Missourians unfurl before your very eyes. (Powerpoint’s got nothing on Cardboardorama® 2.0).

Now, some _____ years later, with so many granular pieces of responsibility and eagerness and duty—I’m scaring myself and small children with my to-do lists. On Saturday, my head exploded – well, that might be an exaggeration – but my eyes did bulge out a bit at the sheer enormity of all the things I need to do, the things falling through the cracks, the things halfway done with no more time to finish them because we’re off and running to the next happy thing, the things I forgot to do (Sarah, if you’re reading this, I hope you had a fantastic birthday, girlfriend! You too, Lora!). It was bound to happen, this spontaneous combustion. I knew life was at Orange Alert level when I wasn’t sending thank you notes in a Timely Fashion.

I could finally stand it no longer, this Angst of Overwhelm.

So I cleared the sidewalk chalk and Poincaré off the dining room table and sat down by myself with a nice fountain pen and a legal pad, one with satisfyingly thick sheets where the ink says “ahhhhh” as it glides on. And I sat and wrote and wrote and wrote, like Malcolm Lowry on a drunken binge under a volcano but without the worm at the bottom on the tequila bottle and without all the sweat he used to sweat. And I didn’t stand up to write like he did (before he inevitably fell down), so maybe it isn’t the best comparison in the world. I could do better, but let’s move on.

I wasn’t writing the Great American novel, no. I was just writing my to-do list. Not in any theme or priority order, but just listing page after page of all I need to do.

There were big things, like paint the house, write the book proposal, raise two children, figure out how much I’m paying per minute for long distance once and for all, and provide input to the human genome project. There were also smaller items: find the missing sandal, get stamps, sharpen the knives, drink more water, and get my parking sticker at the university. There were literally hundreds of them, yellow brick legal pad roads of things that need to be done, rolling around in my head constantly, causing not so unconscious anxiety, what with their not being done and my teetering on the precipice of forgetting to do them, these important actions.

And as I wrote to move them outside of my head (to clear space up in there for things like social security numbers, customer ID numbers, account numbers, and the square root of 389302), I felt like I was sliding further and faster into the morass of undone things, paralyzed by the enormity of it all. Then as I looked at the pile of writing in front of me, I remembered a story I once heard novelist Toni Morrison tell.

Early in her career, Morrison worked at Random House publishers. One day her head exploded just as mine had done, and she started her list of to-do items. She wrote and wrote, pages and pages of things that she must do. Faced with the long list, she sat and looked at it for a long while, finally asking herself one question: “What is it I must do or I shall die?”

After answering that question, there were only two things left on her to-do list: 1) Be a mother to her children; and 2) Write.

I used to work for a big national association, with about 600 chapters around the country. Every year, the leaders of those chapters would come to D.C. to a big pep rally leadership development program. And every year, we would host them for a reception at the national headquarters building, which meant one thing and one thing only: we had to clean up, as if Grandma (who starched and ironed her bed linens) was coming to dinner.

One year, my office was particularly egregiously messy and I was late in preparing for the Big Event. Very important papers and files covered my desk and every horizontal surface, all demanding immediate attention. To give my office a hip zen minimalist organized vibe for the onslaught of chapter presidents, I just swept all those Do-it-or-die action files into a big box and lumbered with it to the Board Room closet, where I tucked it away.

My office was immaculate! I was the self-proclaimed winner of the office decorating contest! I looked über organized! What a great solution!, I thought, patting myself on the back and searching for tiny cheese puffs and the predictable veggies and onion dip as our reception began. This Board Room strategy actually worked so well that the next year, I did exactly the same thing. And that time, as I slowly opened the Board Room closet with the box perched on my hip, there sitting proudly in front of me was the unopened and forgotten box of Vital, Time Sensitive, Ultra Important files from my cleanup the year before.

I guess doing all that stuff wasn’t so vital, after all. None of it got done, nobody died, and life went on, less frenetic, less fractured, more focused, more full.