How to Find a Black Cat in a Dark Room by Jacob Burak

Author:Jacob Burak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: How To Find a Black Cat In a Dark Room
ISBN: 9781786780850
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2017-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

PART III

ALL IN GOOD ORDER

LIST FOR LIFE

The magical powers of a to-do list

What can a to-do list tell us about the person who wrote it? Plenty, if we recall that this is the most common means by which many of us break down our grand dreams into a collection of earthly tasks. Just forget yours in the pocket of a shirt that’s sent to the laundry, and you’ll realize how much to-do lists have become part of your identity.

Our to-do list is like a secular version of a personal prayer, our way of telling the world and ourselves what we want, and in which order. To-do lists have no narrative line. Organizing a sock drawer and writing a book of poems could appear one after the other on such a list. And as many list-makers know, the very act of committing the tasks to paper has a magical effect on the odds that they will actually get done—even if a long period of staring at them is sometimes a prerequisite for obtaining this magical effect. We’re all familiar with the guilt we feel after satisfying our curiosity by peeking into somebody else’s medicine cabinet, or at their lists of cell-phone contacts. Reading someone else’s to-do list has a similar effect. They illuminate the writer’s secret self, the difference between who the person really is and the more polished version he’s trying to present. Reading other people’s to-do lists is a type of low-budget voyeurism, like that of a reality show. We all wonder at times if we’re normal, and reading the lists of tasks facing others provides a calming response. We find that other people’s lives are also filled with challenges.

A to-do list is prepared in several stages. The preliminary one is full of hope and subtle emotions, and makes us confront the blank page face-to-face. At this point, even if the list is not yet fully formed, thinking about the tasks ahead fills us with a sense of purposefulness that begets pride. Then comes the pleasant stage of calling the topics to mind, and the mild euphoria that comes with the thought of all the vast possibilities still open to us.

And finally there’s the real thrill of satisfaction experienced by those who have gone as far as working out a strict timetable for completing all the tasks, most of which are unachievable to begin with. There’s no problem with this if one accepts the words of American artist Charles Green Shaw: “Real happiness consists in not what we actually accomplish, but what we think we accomplish.”

But let’s also admit it: crossing a task off the list after it is completed does have an exhilarating effect which verges on pure euphoria. Psychologists say that compulsive list-makers are trying to create a sense of control over their lives, which, were it not for the lists, would be seen as overly chaotic. Such people have an unconscious fear that their world will spin out of control if they do not keep making their lists.

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