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Home > Archive > Mar 20, 2008

Take Time to Smell the Moldy Cabbage
By Sharon May
Somebody asked me recently, “What’s the one thing you couldn’t live without?” My answer dropped from my brain as mechanically as a gumball: My to-do list.
Not that I have just one list, of course. Well, really, I do have one list, but it evolves several times a day, shedding chores and adding new tasks like a living being – a scaly monster that devours entire countries.
Sometimes, it seems like my whole life is a series of tasks, chores, and errands, all neatly listed on a piece of paper so I don’t forget the pressing things I have to do. And I’m not talking about the ironing. Who has time for that!
For example, on today’s list are 23 tasks, from returning a sweater to the UPS store and getting a prescription filled at Wal-Mart to calling my mother and scouring the splattered cheese from last night’s lasagna from my oven.
I read once that after seven years, the human body has shed all its cells and become entirely “new.” That’s the way my to-do list is. Except it sheds old tasks and adds new ones faster than a mutant 12-story insect. By the end of the day, I have a new yet undiminished to-do list.
I don’t have time to stop and smell the roses. Not unless gardening is on my to-do list for the day.
And when it comes to pondering the deeper realities of life, I don’t have time. For me, “reality” is what’s on my list of tasks. If it isn’t on my list, it doesn’t exist. In fact, my very identity, the root of my very being is grounded in this existential principle: “I list; therefore, I am.” I think this theory originated with Rene Descartes’ wife.
I’m pretty sure the idea of a to-do list goes back much further, though, to the Big Guy himself. Wasn’t there a to-do on his list for each day of creation, ending with: 6. Create mankind. 7. Take a day of rest. After that, his list included: 1. Take walk in garden. 2. Check out new fig-leaf fashion craze. And so forth.
But the Almighty and I aren’t the only ones operating with a to-do list. Remember Hamlet? If I recall my college English, Hamlet did a lot of anguished hand-wringing for procrastinating on his to-do list: 1. Requite Dad’s murder. 2. Return Mother’s Day gift. And no matter how much his friends and family told him, “Hey, thou shouldst chill, dude,” there was no way he could ignore his conscience nagging him to finish his tasks.
I can relate. My own to-do list is always haunting me, waking me in the wee hours with the terrible admonition: “Remember … remember to do this!” And I scribble out another note on my list: 24. Buy toenail clippers (to replace the ones I broke when I used them to cut artificial flower stems).
I always begin my day intending to whip through my entire to-do list and cross out every detestable reminder. In fact, unless I’m laid out flat with a combination of pneumonia, embarrassing indigestion, a gigantic facial zit and tapeworms, I always get busy on my tasks.
Nevertheless, I end my day with a longer list than I began with. It never fails. And that describes the progression of my days. I’m Eliot’s Prufrock, measuring out my life not with coffee spoons but with to-do lists.
I’ve decided this is my fate. Sisyphus rolled his rock; I write my lists. Which reminds me, I need to sweep up the gravel that my tires tracked into the garage. I’d better write that on my list, or I’ll forget.
To tell the truth, I don’t know what I’d do without my daily to-do list. If somehow I ever actually completed my list, I would be left shambling through my day without direction, adrift and unanchored.
Making a to-do list is such a habit that I don’t think even death will stop me. I’ll shock my mourners by suddenly sitting up in my casket and scribbling a to-do list for the funeral on a piece of satin coffin lining.
And when I reach those pearly gates, St. Peter will be there, I’m sure, to point me to a “Thou shalt do” list numbering #1 through infinity, stuck to those heavenly gates with an “Eden National Park” refrigerator magnet.
But speaking of refrigerators, I need to remind myself to toss out that moldy cabbage.

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