hope

I forget things. And I’m assiduous and indiscriminate in the execution of this labor. Nothing is too important or insignificant to merit the random application of my long-standing skill.

But, if you forget things when you’re the coordinator of a family of six, things tend to spiral out of control rather quickly. So last week, tired of the ever-present entropy, I wiped the white board clean and divided it into seven sections. I wrote the name of each day (in a lovely flowing script) at the top of each column, and began to list every tiny item that I have to remember to do every day. Things like “Brush Childrens’ Hair” and “Make Lunch”. I ended up with 163 of them for the entire week.

That done, I thought, all I have to do is follow this list and at the end of each week I’ll have the reward-a smoothly running home. Nice. But something went wrong. The employee I’d hired to do all that work, the one I’d nicely laid out all the tasks in a helpful little list for, was not doing her job. She was cutting her eyes at my list, mumbling threatening things under her breath, and avoiding doing even the easiest items. But why? What was her problem? Following a list ought to be so easy!

Then I began to realize the reasons I didn’t want to follow that interminable, micromanaging list. I was resentful of the demands on my time. I had other, lovelier things to do. I want to sew, paint, read, sing, and do it all on the spur of the moment. Why, that list would take ALL WEEK! And whoever wrote that list was trying to control me. I am my own person! How dare she??

For a while I’ll go with the list, because it seems to be the thing to do. I’ll make it to the end of a day and will have crossed off 90% of the items, and for a moment I’ll feel completely happy about having accomplished something with this day. But then a feeling of total despair follows the happiness, and I wonder, good grief, is THAT all I’ve done today? Laundry. Clean kitchen. Food. No dreaming, no dancing, no creating anything.

And so I’ve struggled with this for a long while. The list, that list of nit-picky small items that keeps your family running, healthy, sane, that is what you’re supposed to be doing. But what about the things you want to be doing? There is no time right now for those, and they sit in a dusty corner of your mind and you look toward them longingly as you scrub toilets again.

But this morning I picked up “Man’s Search for Meaning” before the glaze of sleep had worn off of my eyes and mind, and I read this quote from Nietzche, “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.” Despite the obvious possibilities for surname pun fun there, something clicked hard. Of course it’s something we know, but apparently not something I always remember.

When Pandora let all the evils out of her terrible jar, including, I assume, 163-item to-do lists, the only thing left inside was a tiny, bright virtue called hope. The only way that mankind could handle the wash of challenge that would flood us every day was left shining alone in the bottom of our souls.

I defy the list to be the master of my life. It is a tool only, to get what I want, what I hope for. Which is what? A clean house? For some folks, that may be enough hope, but that’s too fragile for me. Healthy, happy family? Now we’re getting closer. I think that what gives me hope is the challenges overcome, the victories won, the opportunities to grow that are offered to me through the difficulties of a young family and a life spent facing Pandora’s ills. I hope that my children can see my desire to grow, learn, overcome myself, and that they will have the desire, and hope, to do the same. I hope that they are better at it than I am.

So it seems that the thing to get the boss-lady and the worker-lady on the same page is a shared vision of this hope. We’ll have to get our noses up off the grindstone long enough to look beyond it at what we’re working for here. I am the master of the list, not the other way around.

Now if we could just convince her of that…