The List Can Wait

On breaking the spell of productivity

Welcome to Making Time. What makes a life feel vivid rather than rushed? These are my reflections from rural Oregon on attention, ritual, and making things by hand. If you’d like to follow along, you can subscribe for free.

Our home is on a small cliff, and from the south-facing windows, I can see out onto our lower few acres. When we moved here, it was choked with wild blackberries. Now there are a few stands left for picking fruit in the summer, but the rest has been cut into sloping grassy fields.

From the windows of my upstairs office, I look out. In winter, the shadows are long and the light a paler gold. A small family of deer move across it in the morning. I watch them move from one corner of the window to another.

It feels distant. From up in my office, my mind swims with deadlines and work still undone. Another ping comes in, pulling me back to my phone.

On my desk, a small notepad lists my tasks for the day, like an incantation. If I can only get it exactly right, everything will be ok. Tomorrow there will be a new one. Perform the steps, live another day.

My focus shifts to the long shadows cast on my desk from the window, the dark outlines of trees projected onto the paper. In that moment, for only a second, the spell is broken. There’s a buzzing under my skin, an urge to move.

I glance back at the list on my desk. For a moment, I hesitate. There is still so much to do today.

But my body insists. I march myself downstairs, before my mind can catch up. I pull on wool socks and my old trail shoes, throw on my favorite ratty red coat. Come on, dogs. Let’s go.

Across the yard, through a gateway of trees, we climb down the muddy slope to the gravel road. In a few minutes, I’m in the field, open to the sun. I follow the dogs as they explore the edges. I close my eyes and let my eyelids bake until they’re warm. I carefully pick a path through the torn brambles on the ground, nothing particular on my mind now.

Oddly, I feel the urge to read a poem, so I pull my phone from my pocket and find an old favorite. I lean against a stump and read it to the dogs, to no one, to myself. It’s a luxury to read a poem where no one is listening.

When I look up, I can see my office window from here, small and far away. The notepad is still on the desk. The messages are still waiting. But from down here, they’re just shapes behind glass.

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