It all starts with a list. If you’re lucky or just young you find that there is not a ton of responsibility on your plate just yet. It might be that lists are too premature at this stage. After all, how much do you really need to do? However, the unlucky are the ones who struggle. The ones who’ve been weathered by age and responsibility find that it is always a balance of trying to live a happy life and completing as many tasks as they can stand to complete while living with the reality that they (we) cannot complete all of them. Still there is respite in lists. There is this sense of control that manifests when you decide what you can and cannot accomplish; what you will and will not do each and every day. Feeling in control makes it better, if only a little.
So, it starts with a list. It is a collection of everything that needs to be done. It starts with what must be done today, but it cannot end there (if only because what must be done today never can all actually get done today). It stretches and puffs to include the larger list of responsibilities that are not daily. It is the grading and the home tasks and the papers tumbling down the pipeline. It is the job applications and the cleaning and the groceries. It is the practices and the planning. All of it matriculates on the list until it looks like Santa’s list and you feel like you must’ve been quite naughty to garner all of these responsibilities. Maybe, but that is neither here nor there. Things need to get done, and knowing what those things are is, as the Joe’s said when you were a kid, “Half the battle.”
You fight the other half with a piece of mind. You must be radiant in your daily selection. You must channel awareness of what must be done, maintained, and put aside. Perhaps the hardest part is sacrifice. It is difficult to limit your own freedom. It is difficult to say, I am not going to spend 3 hours on happiness today. Maybe just one. You know that choice impacts those around you and that makes it easier to blow off the work and decide there will come a time, when you are alone perhaps, to get it all done. Though you know that time is an illusion crafted by your mind to allow yourself to enjoy the day and the people you love.
This is why we have the list. This is why we put times on everything. We build a range and decide when things will get done and we stick to it.
Or at least we try. We fail. We try again the next day.