You don't plan to live a boring life
I tried using index cards to make my lists and carry a daily schedule with me, and that lasted about a week. I still think it’s a good idea and I may return to it. A month before, I was trying to timeblock myself into order, which actually lasted four weeks but every day was a failure of some sort.
It’s been more than 20 years since I broke free from the bondage of my box of index cards, with its sections holding cards for each month and each week and tabs for days 1-31, plus seasonal sections for stuff like cleaning air filters and washing the walls. Every day had multiple index cards, and every day the promise of rest or fun came at the end of the stack I never reached.
My! how you’ve grown. When that way of living became unsustainable (#life) I ditched the cards, but in truth, I have always been trying to find a way to control things through organization. I am still sure there is a system that will work for me.
For a week I carried an index card around each day, writing easy lists and random thoughts as they came to me. “Your life is not boring” was an incomplete thought I had while in town one day, and I wrote it down to ring a bell about something more specific, something with deeper meaning. Maybe it was about the way I am always struck by the web of human connections, how each person is moving through time and space, touching every other person’s time and space, and we are all an infinite depth reverberating stories we don’t have time to develop. Your life is not boring but you need to take the time to tell it. You are a bell that needs rung once in awhile.
There is a writer in my Notes feed who has been posting photos of a kestrel falcon that has come to visit her porch everyday for over a week. She and others read all kinds of meaning into it—”Focus. Clarity. Foresight. Action. Balance.”—and I have decided I want a falcon (and focus, clarity, foresight, action, and balance please). I have the perfect porch for one at our new home, surrounded by forest.
I read H is for Hawk last year but I’d forgotten all the brutality. I googled “how to attract a hawk” because I want to be Nora in New York, and the main suggestion was to attract smaller birds first, as food for the hawk.
We haven’t put up our birdfeeders since our move but I’m having second thoughts. I would gladly dangle a rodent from the porch to attract an American kestrel, but not a bird1. I know this is how nature works and I’m no good for valuing a bird over a mouse, but these are the choices I make, the hierarchy I’m willing to submit to: rodents at the very bottom, songbirds at the top. Maybe I would be willing to sacrifice a few birds in the wild for the gift of a kestrel’s daily visit, but I will not be purposefully attracting one with little goldfinch or chickadee bait.
It’s exciting to think of a daily visit from a bird. It’s frightening to think about the cougars who for sure live in the woods around our new home. Once, from the safety of my car, I watched a mama cougar and two babies traipse across Wildcat Road, where we used to live. Bobcats don’t bother me, but I could go my whole life without seeing or hearing about another cougar please and thank you. Everything I want is on some hierarchy and it’s frustrating that some of the things I want—maybe most of them?—require the presence of something I don’t want, or am too lazy to care enough about. This is probably the root of my schedule-and-organization worship.
I just want something a little more exotic than the blue jays and wild turkeys who roam like rodents all over here. Even the albino turkey is old news now. I know there are wild things in the woods, and I want to see everything but the cougars. I want to be Nora in New York but I definitely do not want to live in New York and I probably don’t want many other parts of Nora’s life. But I do, I think, want her bird.
Today, “make pie for Sunday” was written in my planner, which is the one organizational tool I will never part with. I had lit my fall candle and was making an enjoyable task out of an apple pie, when Scout started growling and pacing. She is normally sleeping in one of her several beds or standing on my feet, begging to go for a walk, and barking is not normal. I went to the window to see what her fuss was about, thinking it was probably the deer at the apple tree again. I looked out the window and caught the last few galumphs of a galloping black bear, headed for the woods.
For a week I carried an index card around to capture to-dos and schedules and fleeting thoughts, trying to organize my life and gather pieces to make some kind of meaning. For a month I color coded my google calendar into productive little rectangles. Nothing exciting happened within those tightly controlled windows.
My life is not boring, but my schedule is. I am a bell that needs rung once in awhile.
(I didn’t get a picture of the bear but you can please refer to me as Tresta in the Treehouse now, and hope with me that Pooh will visit again and I can get a photo.)
Okay, maybe a bluejay.
I would like to see the bear's index card!