Back in the days of my Life Without a To-Do List (it largely coincides with the Life Before Kids) I was rather dismissive of the folks with To-Do Lists. Why use a piece of paper when you could just remember everything you need to do? But now, I am totally not dismissive of anyone using a To-Do List–primarily because I am so dang submissive to my own.

My To-Do List rules my life.

And yet, before a few minutes ago, you wouldn’t have found one anywhere in my house. Not on my laptop, my smartphone, anywhere. Because my To-Do List is in my head, yelling obscenities at me, remember? In hopes of saving my sanity, I decided to get the hateful thing out of my head and onto a piece of paper where I could give it the side-eye and yell back at it.

I actually typed up a little prototype to try for the next week. I designed it based on something the agent, Kate McKean posted this morning out on Twitter: GTD breakthrough, you guys: My To-Do list is two facing pages, 1: short tasks, 2: long tasks. I pick according to the time I have. Works!” I changed my column titles to “Tasks” and “Fast Tasks” after Littlest and I giggled about describing different things I need to do during my day. He giggled because the words sounded funny together. I giggled because the alternative was to get depressed. But now I smile when I read “Fast Tasks”, which I think is a mighty fine unplanned by-product.

I did this To-Do List making thing after a bit of my own Eureka! moment. Obviously, first I read Ms. McKean’s tweet. And then I thought about my life back when I was a cubicle worker and Eureka-ed again.

Life is better in the cubicle.

There, I said it. And now let the flaming begin. I’ll get another cup of coffee and then explain myself.

A bit of background or explanation or justification… My husband works in the corporate world and has a stressful but rewarding job we are uber thankful for. Most days he comes home, unclips his ID card from his shirt, puts it and his keys in the basket and gets the hug/kiss/DADDY’S HOME!!!!/sniff from the dog/Hi hon, how are you? routine. He is home. His workday is done. That part of his identity is complete for another “x” hours.

Mister Soandso may not always be happy or content with his life, but he has his routine – get up, work-out, go to work, come home for dinner, time with his kids, surf Reddit, hang out until bedtime and then get up and do it all over again. The weekends differ but also have a routine of their own, primarily revolving around the kiddos. In between there are lunches with co-workers, drinks with the guys, reading Game of Thrones, that kind of stuff. You know, life. But it is a life with demarcations.

I have a life with few demarcations not related to school schedules.

And there are no cubicles in my world. I am primarily a stay-at-home-mom; I have a part-time job that I do mostly from home. So my cubicle is the same place where the other stuff in my life happens. There are no lines, only piles of dirty laundry and dust-bunnies dancing under the couches.

I left the cubicle for the classroom and then the classroom for home. And I haven’t felt “successful” since then. That was in 2004 and let me tell you, eight years is a long time to feel like a loser because the To-Do List in your head looks exactly the same at 11:30 pm as it did at 6:30 am.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the cubicle world when I was doing that gig. Dilbert aptly describes many of its nuisances.

But my three years of cubicle existence meant there were three years of punching my time-card at the prescribed times. I knew when lunch and break times were to occur and that I would get them. I knew that when I pushed my chair back under my desk every night, I didn’t need to think about my job again until I pulled my chair out the next morning. The time I spent away from that cubicle was mine.

Even when I was a teacher and I carted stacks and stacks of student’s work home and back again, there was my “work self” and my “me self”. If I didn’t want to be Mrs. Martin, the high school English teacher, I shopped 20 miles away from my home. I could separate those parts of myself and while the teaching part bled into my home life, you can bet I never thought once about if the tub needed scrubbing while teaching ninth graders compound subjects.

But now, my world is a blended thing resembling something that Van Gogh and Dali might have created if they had collaborated after a night of hard drinking. There are no crisp lines neatly bisecting the whole into tidy pieces. Instead the lines start off strong but then meander off and then stop all together part way through things, only to take up again and head into a different direction. There are bits and pieces where they don’t belong. The colors are flamboyant and would be lovely in more moderate consumption or at least in a more orderly fashion. My world is a world rendered by other’s hands. And while most of it is exactly what I want it to be in theory, the delivery isn’t quite how I planned back when I decided to live life this way. It turns out that a pay-check provides more than income. It and its work place create space for the other parts of one’s identity to flourish in ways that the kitchen table cannot.

I want to go to bed at night feeling more accomplished.

And not simply in a theoretical way. I want to be able to check things off, to be able to go to bed feeling like a success. I want to find the way to combine the mom parts with the director parts and the writer parts and still have a few hours left over to sleep. Maybe, just maybe, the answer is to write it down and check it off.

So my thought is to try this: for a week, try to use a “real” To-Do List and see if crossing off the little things helps me focus on getting some of the big ones crossed off too. If I’ve already checked off the laundry, letting it sit while I work on another task. And ultimately, can I go to bed at night feeling like I really got something done? Or will I go to bed still feeling overwhelmed and underachieved?

I doubt Dilbert would appreciate my need to create a To-Do List nor my thinking his day in a cubicle is all that grand. But then, Dilbert can push in his chair and go home tonight thinking to himself, “well, at least I got all those paper clips unchained and back in my drawer.” When I’m doing that, I’m still trying to remember if I got Oldest’s track uniform washed and did I get tater tots or French fries and what was I thinking I would do with the pork chops, grilled maybe?, and what is the best way to get permanent marker out of Littlest’s karate go anyway?

I am hoping that a To-Do List breaking tasks into the stuff I know will take focussed attention versus the stuff I can do while supervising piano lessons will help me be able to push my chair back under my kitchen table tonight and feel like I may not have got it all done, but I did enough to get up and do it all again tomorrow.

Hopefully smiling.

Actually, they all are, but he knows his death is coming sooner than later. It is terribly sad, a young man and father dying of a brain tumor.

I bumped into him at the grocery store last week and this morning, as I wheeled my cart past where we’d stopped and chatted, I thought about him, our conversation, and hostas.

You see, as much as this young man is my neighbor, before last week, I’d never spoken to him. Not once. He lives a street over and a few blocks south of me and our paths simply never crossed before. His kids go to the schools my kids have attended – his oldest is a year behind my Middlest at school, and I run or walk past his house every day.

And yet I’d never met him. Then, a few months ago people started talking about him. His blog started being posted and reposted on my FB page, Middlest started talking about this little boy in her school who’s dad is dying.

Lives, crossing paths.

I was at the grocery store with Littlest. My neighbor was with his four year old. Littlest was happily distracted with a game on the iPod. As I reached in the case for a tub of hummus, I watched my neighbor try to heft a gallon of milk into his handicap scooter with his little girl’s help. As he adjusted the pile of things in the basket, she skipped away, attention caught by the kiosk of animal cards across the aisle.

My own kids pull away from me to spin that kiosk, reading each and every card that catches their fancy. Dogs in birthday hats, a frog in sunglasses, a cat with an orange-peel helmet. In my world, that kiosk is a source of frustration as I have to read card after card that one or both kids thinks is “awesome Mom!” and then put them back away correctly.

So I stood there, hands on my cart, wondering what I should do.

Obviously, here is a man in poor health. He’s having a bit of trouble getting the gallon of milk in the basket without setting it on the bananas. And his daughter is behind him, oblivious to all the strangers who could so easily whisk her away. I didn’t want to step on toes, to offer unwanted help, to create tension where there might be none. So I hesitated.

And then the milk found its place away from the bananas and she ran up to him to show off the “awesome Dad!” card gripped in her fist.

I turned my cart around and went on with my list.

But then, next to the cereal and boxes of granola bars, he appeared. I was deep into the ingredient list of two different granola bars and fielding advice from Littlest over what sounded best and what on earth would Biggest most likely eat, when my neighbor purred up behind me and reached for a box of granola bars. I was in his way and murmured all the appropriate things.

“I see you’ve got some hostas. You know, if you want any more, feel free to come by my house and get some. I won’t be needing any of mine anymore,” he said, nodding to my cart with four hostas tucked between Littlest and the cart.

It was the start of a lovely conversation about gardening and making plans and living what matters. And it was a conversation that was steeped in death.

As I wheeled back down the cereal aisle today, grabbing a box of Life cereal for Biggest, I thought about my neighbor’s words.

He is a kind man. The kind of kind man we hate to see die young. I am saddened by the thought of his wife and kids saying goodbye to him that very last time.

And yet, perhaps he is the lucky one.

His daughter knows no man more strong or amazing or handsome.

His son knows no man more courageous or protective.

His wife knows no man who loves her more.

My neighbor will die at the prime of his life but he will have all his loved ones surrounding him for that last goodbye.

He won’t die alone, forgotten in a nursing home. He won’t die a broken shell of the dreamer he once was. He won’t die in vain.

He will die, years before his loved ones are ready for him to go and because cancer found him, but surrounded by examples of all the goodness he brought into this world.

We are all dying. Every one of us is here but for a short time really.

I wonder how my own death will come about. Will I be left behind and forgotten, an elderly shell of what and who I once was? Will it be over in an instant? Will it be lingering?

I cannot control the end. But I can control the now. So I hope to do more of  what my neighbor did last week in the grocery store.

He looked around for his daughter. I saw his face wrinkle with concern and then smooth when he found her. And then he turned that motorized handicapped scooter around and rolled up to her. He pulled her onto his lap and then proceeded to read all the cards with her.

He knows he won’t get many tomorrows. So he is filling up each of his todays with as much as he can.

And he is offering strangers his perennials, so that he will live on, in gardens all over our neighborhood.

That’s the trouble with dying…too many leave without leaving a trace, with the todays empty because preparing for the tomorrows took precedent.

This beauty just opened yesterday. So lovely!

It’s that time of year here in the northwest when the flowers and trees are going crazy at a pace matched only by the allergy sufferer’s running eyes and noses. All the stores have their spring flowers out and the remaining hanging baskets from the Mother’s Day bonanza fill the shops. It is a torrent of color and wonderful smells. It pleases me. This time of year always fills me with hopefulness and that great possibility of the what if.

Yes, I love gardening.

Or, to be more honest, I love creating a garden.

There is something calming to my way of thinking when you take a piece of land in wild disarray and turn it into something of beauty. Perhaps you’ve tilled it into a vegetable garden, or sown wildflowers via seed bombs. Or perhaps you’ve weeded a flower bed of the plants choking out the flowers. No matter what, you have created something you find beautiful.

When I bought my first house, I spent many hours one summer turning the square lawn into a space with gently curving flower beds filled with perennials planted with height, color, and bloom times all taken into account and mapped out. (Jenny, if you are reading this, sorry I ignored you while I was toiling away in my garden beds. I suck.) It was hard work under that Minnesotan sun to turn a thirty-year old lawn into sculpted flower beds, but the potential for color and texture and scents was worth it.

Years laters we sold that house and I presented my accurate and to-scale maps of the front and back yards to the new owner who’s eyes glazed over. Finally I stopped yammering on about how the lilies would bloom at the precise time to best complement the bush in the opposite corner and simply asked her to water them.

Thousands of hours of labor and dollars in bulbs and plants, left in the hands of the uninitiated and uninterested.

Now I’m in my third home and I’m back to standing, hand on shovel and pondering xeriscapes. But now my interests lie more in the direction of creating order. Lasting order.

Because now as much as I still want color and texture and scents, and butterflies and hummingbirds, I don’t have the luxury of the time it takes to maintain that kind of garden. So all the bulbs I carefully moved from one area of my yard to another and which grow badly in their new spot…all getting ripped out and given away. In their place, hard to kill and requiring very little attention hostas.

I was collecting newspapers in preparation for this huge project and got thinking about my current love-hate relationship with gardening. As much as I love the act of gardening, the act of creating beauty, I hate maintaining that beautiful garden. My gardens, flower and vegetable alike, serve as reminders of my life: excitement and enthusiasm worn down by the daily drudgery of it all.

I simply cannot maintain things in a way I want. And by things, I mean not just the gardens around my house but the things within my house. In fact, I mean the things even in my own head.

There is so much potential for beauty and bounty within me, but it’s all in danger of being choked out by the weeds that exist within me as well.

So what’s this girl to do? Do I rip it all out and plant only hostas? Or do I embrace the weeds as hardy perennials and mourn the deaths of my more high-maintenance but beautiful plants? I’ve already stopped performing stand-up to focus on writing, but is writing any more hardy than comedy? Do I shrug my shoulders and put all those creative outlets aside until I’m no longer the parent to three young children? The garden in my mind needs a balance between bloom times!

For now, I’m hoping some hard work, back bent beneath the hot northwestern sun, will cultivate not just more tidy gardens but to-scale maps for a long term plan.

For I am a garden, inside and out, begging for tending. I am filled with hopefulness and the possibility of what if. I am a newly bloomed rose bud that will unfurl and then fade away but be breathtaking at least for a day.

As folks in the United States know, it was Mother’s Day on Sunday. I had a lovely day with my absolutely favorite four people in this world and that was a lovely gift in and of itself. And then last night, I ran across a link that stopped me for a bit. The story broke of the “Elephant Whisperer” Lawrence Anthony’s death and the apparent mourning of his death by the elephants he fought to protect. The article does a nice job of giving the history of Anthony’s work with the elephants as well as the mystery of how they knew he had died.

I love the times when we recognize that there is much more at work in this world than what we put into motion. Yes, we may have those nifty opposable thumbs and all those other perks to being the type of mammals that we are. However, I think we too easily overlook something powerful just because we can oppose those thumbs of ours.

We are all connected.

I visualize that connection as if all lives on this planet are connected to one another, much like how we can see the root system of a strawberry plant connecting plant after plant after plant. All individual plants and yet all connected by stolons. (In case you are curious, these new plants are actually clones of the original plant.)

Yes, I realize I’m a bit of a softy and I also look for reasons to support my life-long-held belief that all life is connected. But over and over I have found that the ripples of one life are destined to impact other lives. If you are open to seeing the ways we are all connected, you will see those connections. So when I read about elephants traveling miles to suddenly show up at the home of a man that cared for them, I see that as the powerful energy in the cosmos reaching them across their version of the strawberry’s stolon.

Most people I know admit to having some experience where (s)he has felt an odd connection to another person and acted upon it. Perhaps he felt a family member was with him in spite of that family member’s recent death. Or perhaps she reunited with a long-ago relationship because of a dream. In my case (well, one of many), I woke up one morning with a strong need to phone my grandmother. She was dying of throat cancer at the time and I “knew” I needed to talk to her that day. She died not long after that. Experiences such as those remind me that we are all connected at a deeper level even though we often do not act upon those connections.

But in our day-to-day lives we feel those connections as well. We are pulled to other people; we are pulled to connect with other people. Those connections lift us up and help us through our rough patches.

I recently got word that a dear little boy is facing some potential health concerns. Living in the technological era that we do, his mama texted me. I was so thankful I always have my phone on and usually on my person. I spent this morning with her and her sweet boy and was reminded how much I value the connection there – two moms who worry over their babies.

While I spent my Mother’s Day with my happy and fairly healthy kids, she had spent her first Mother’s Day in the hospital. I smiled and laughed several times yesterday. She cried.

This morning, my heart felt so heavy for her.

And yet, I find peace in my heavy heart. Because without it I would have no proof of the connection I have to her. Like elephants traveling the distance, we humans also feel for one another and because of one another.

When I told Littlest that I was going to go be with my friend and her baby this morning, he reminded me of what he had said when I first got the news. “Mama, I will hold him in my heart.”

Which is where we hold all our loved ones, including the ones we love as part of our larger family. We hold them in our hearts and in our thoughts.

They say that elephants have long memories…let it be the same for all of us as well.

On my way back through one of the nation’s high places, I stopped for lunch in Frisco, Colorado. And while I was unable to find a fully gluten-free lunch, I did manage to find food, more coffee, and this little thing. I’ve decided it makes a fine talisman.

After all, who doesn’t need to be reminded to be fearless?

I rather like the combined effects of this bit of shiny. First off, it’s a puzzle piece. Secondly, one side is engraved with “I am” and the other with “Fearless”. When I spied it, it was like one of those hokey ray of sunshine Hallmark card moments. Like the proverbial powers that be were reminding me that if I want to figure out this puzzler of life, then I’d better find out what I’m made of and then figure out how to be a bit more fearless.

I’d like to think that the fact I was even there on a road I’d never before travelled was a nod to my ability to be a bit more fearless.

But the fact is I am not good at being fearless. Heck, some days I barely manage the “I am” aspect of the equation.

All those crap-moments that have floated down my stream over the years has created a fearful little ole me. And how crappy is that?

Do you remember when you turned fearful? Was it a person or an event or just a whole lotta crap coming down the river at you? For me, the answer is Yes.

And, of course, the ultimate answer is me.

Because in order to become fearless, I must remember that I am.

After two flights which made me mildly panicked, I arrived home. And I’m still buried in all the stuff I normally do everyday but which didn’t happen while I was gone. You know, like the two loads of laundry that have to happen everyday. That kind of stuff. The stuff that is only important when you realize there are no clean undies in your drawer or the hardwood floor becomes fuzzy.

And when the dust bunnies and laundry and dirty floors get to this point, I am totally overwhelmed. Instead of getting anything done, I just want to curl into a fetal-shaped ball and take a nap. A messy house makes me fear-full like whoa. But like most fear-filled  moments, there is only one thing to do…get through it. In this case, it’s setting a timer for 15 minute increments and working through the chaos until I get through it. One freaking dust bunny at a time, one 15 minute rotation at a time until I get the house clean enough to invite someone over so I don’t stew in my own sad-panda juices. (Yes, I am aware that this makes me seem a bit left of normal, but I also know I’m not alone in this.)

The best thing about my trip to a writer’s retreat was not just the camaraderie or the locale. It was being refueled with the ability to write. I think most of us writerly types get to a spot in our stories where the words might be there, but the way to align them is gone. Or perhaps the way is there, but we cannot see it due to the dust and life-debris obscuring our view. Being with other writers was like being handed a map through the chaos. It also reminded me that the way to fix this novel is the same as cleaning my house: set the timer, work like a mad woman, and move on. It may take more rotations than I want, but eventually I’ll get it cleaned up until it’s ready to be shared with others.

Amazing how a different pair of eyes can see what we so easily overlook.

So I’m back home, doing the dishes and the laundry, and the writing. My house and my novel are both heading in the right direction…tidy enough to be shared. The house cleaning and the words are never really done, because the living in them happens. Both are messy, requiring effort and time and the reminder to fearlessly share the results.