Started out so young & strong

Only to surrender

Do you make to do lists?

I definitely do.

I recently bought a dry erase board. I use it to set my agenda for the week. It’s intensely satisfying to create, to check items off, to wipe the board clean and start a week anew.

One thing that these weekly lists aren’t too great for, however, is lofty projects. Those long-term, slow-going projects that need space and time to expand.

Those which require collaboration.

Those which may never be done but still require doing.

The Never-ending Story

These items tend to float in the air above my head like ever-present thought bubble which follows me from town to town.

So, naturally, the short-term everythings remain at the forefront of the day to day — dentist appts, senior pictures, paying bills, planning holidays, social media scrolling, planting mums.

All the while the ever-patient long-term never-ending to-dos hum along in the nearby ether-sphere just waiting for a breath of attention.

Time has such a way of fluctuating and changing shape: of being thick and available and at the ready when I am not.

Of being slender and perfectly formed in wee and strange hours when others are groping for me.

Before I had so many people, I hadn’t experienced such a strange feeling of time’s compression — I was still young and didn’t know my own capacity.

It’s like having body dysmorphia but with time: back then I might look at a Saturday and think:

How will I get this all done!

When in point of fact my tasks were slender enough to fit inside one skinny pant leg of this 52-year-old mother’s afternoon.

This one sunny afternoon

Coming to terms with the BIG stuff of life is like this.

I mean — look outside! It’s so beautiful here in KC today. The sky is blue, it’s 67 degrees — it’s lovely!

It’s so pretty … and so easy to float along in the sea of ignore-ance.

I can pretend that natural gas isn’t pumping pumping pumping into the Baltic Sea.

I can pretend a Category 4 hurricane hasn’t just chewed up the gulf coast.

I can pretend that driving to Walmart to shop — just a little bit — won’t make that much of a difference.

A spiral of sameness

Once I had a roommate who was anorexic. She was a nursing student who had to leave school to take care of her disease. One semester she came to live with me via Craigslist. She was trying to recover her independence and her parents were trying to let her.

But it was clear by looking at her sunken eyes that it was hopeless. She was a skeleton draped in skin.

One day she went shopping at Arizona Trading Company and came home with a few pieces of clothing. She was excited to show them to me. They were all sized 8. I cooed over them quizzically, then asked, “are these for someone else?”

“No. Why?” she answered smiling, holding them up to herself.

The clothes hung off her like drapery.

She ate small plates of steamed veggies cut in the teeniest of bites, taking an hour.

She sprinkled fat free yogurt with Sweet ‘n Low.

She moved glacially up and down the staircase, gripping the handrail.

Eventually her parents came and took her back to KU Med Center and had her admitted. She had 24-hour nursing in her room, to watch her eat, to be sure she didn’t exercise.

Even so, she’d manage to evade her jailer and to walk up and down the staircases.

When she was 28 that year, she died of starvation, her body feeding off of her internal organs. Right to the end, she did all the wrong things to try to make herself happy.

What is pretending

I think there’s always a part of me that believes I am a fighter. That I am an agent of change. And that change happens one small bite at a time.

I believe that I am on the ground working to save our Mother Earth from the violence of the body dysmorphia we each inflict upon it everyday.

Like many, I grind away today with the sense that tomorrow will always be here. That these little things matter.

That time will open up for these bigger, lofty projects — soon.

Acclimatizing to autotune

Recently I’ve felt myself losing hope. Even when I am making small, daily changes, I feel that the little items on the daily to-do list aren’t ever going to be enough to solve our climate crises — to change broken minds.

I still drive a gas-fueled car. I still shop at Amazon. I still enjoy flights to far flung places. I still eat food sprayed with Roundup. I hardly even notice autotune anymore.

I can’t decide if my daily to-do list items matter. Even though I know they help pay the bills. They help move the sludge of the day along.

I don’t know if what I’m working on is the bigger picture. Am I on the path of goodness?

Or am I’m just cutting my veggies into smaller and smaller pieces?

“I'm gonna be a happy idiot
And struggle for the legal tender
Where the ads take aim and lay their claim
To the heart and the soul of the spender …”

— “The Pretender” Jackson Browne