small shifts

So often in my life, the biggest changes hinge on the smallest shifts. Just recently, in fact, I was with a friend and happened to see her daily planner. She was showing me some odd bit of something she’d collected and scribbled down for later. Her book, I noted, looked nothing like mine. I stared at her pages. They were perfectly ordinary, no elaborate decorations or cute drawings. No washi tape or fancy clips. But at that moment, a door in my mind swung wide open.

I’m a quasi-bullet journaler. By this I mean, I absorbed the idea of a planning notebook and I write down all my tasks in a neat row and check them off when they are done. At the beginning of the year I make an index in the front and never write anything in it except: “January, p 1.” Sometimes I keep one of those vertical calendars and then get confused by it. Occasionally I use a symbol to mark a task, then forget what the symbol means; later when I notice that task still hasn’t been done, I write it again in a daily task list. My task list includes everything I need to get done in a day: yoga, walk, clean bathrooms, water plants, call X, etc. It works for me.

My friend, as far as I could tell, used a similar method for keeping track of her to-do list: a list, some checkmarks. What caught my attention wasn’t her method, it was her content. She’s a busy woman with multiple jobs and a family. Her day probably has a hundred tasks she could put down and mark off. But her task list didn’t have any of the mundane suspects my own does. She didn’t write down, “feed animals,” like I do - as if I don’t feed the animals every single day of my life, as if somehow, if it doesn’t appear on a list I will just look blankly at the meowing cats and shrug, clueless as to why they keep bothering me. Instead, my friend’s book was a collection of her notes, inspirations, ideas, and specific tasks related to her art.

When I got home, I looked in my notebook and found endless lists of household chores. The same things every day on a rotating carousel. Monday always has “clean kitchen.” Thursday always has “meal plan.” If an archeologist digs up this book someday they will not know I am a writer. They will believe I spent every full day of my life cleaning and cleaning and cleaning some more. (Occasionally, you will find in a task list the all-purpose word “write.” That’s it.)

I’ve thought about this a great deal in the time since I saw my friend’s book, the reasons why such a complex and demanding part of my life rarely shows up in my own notebook. Part of it has to do with fear and claiming ownership of myself. It’s hard to fail at a task like “scrub toilets,” after all. Part of it has to do with a natural period of transition from one career to another, and this, I am still trying to work out.

But I do know this: the next day I didn’t write down anything I usually would. I didn’t note down that it was the day for cleaning bedrooms and doing laundry. I didn’t remind myself to exercise and give basic care to the animals. I wrote a detailed list of what needed to happen next in my novel. And when I came across things I needed to remember for writing articles or ideas for future posts, or notes for my newsletter, I wrote those down there too. Suddenly, my whole approach shifted. In the past, I have struggled to take the time for my writing work the way I should. I would sit down, write frantically for a couple hours, then look at my task list and see a whole list of chores still hanging over me. Now when I look at the page, there is nothing but the vital work calling to me and I am free to attend to it. Amazingly, so far, even without my lists, the house is still standing, the animals are alive and I am still clean and healthy.

Such a small, yet transformative shift.

I’d love to hear about the ways you nurture your own vocations.

peace keep you.

tonia