List-Making and Passwords

Someone dredged up and read our old post from August 2021 about list making.  It made F do two things – send a reminder to the Greek tax accountant; and review the lists she has made lately.

Someone told her that it takes 6 months to settle back into your own culture when you return from working overseas.  OK English is not her own culture but it has been her home for nearly 2 of my lifetimes. 

She thought ‘Rubbish – 6 months?  Really?’

She was wrong.  We have been very unsettled for over 6 months, and hours of hard work and distractions packed into every week haven’t changed a bit that feeling of being on quicksand.

I sense it.  She seems a bit distant a lot of the time, sort of distracted by something in the distance, sort of tired, sort of going through the motions…. “lights on, no one home”.

List making is a false sense that she is in control of all that change. She isn't. No one is. What she can control is how she responds to it.

So respond. Stop making lists and examine yourself woman.

Be present in the moment. 

The trouble is that moments devoted to her job are often filled with nothing but waiting: waiting for an emergency to deal with, waiting for some work to come in.  It is kind of boring and her mind wanders to all the ways she could be better spending that time – creatively, productively, environmentally, enjoying outdoors, time spent with people (especially when we are working from home), or doing some exercise or cooking good meals.

I am good company; she says so, but I don’t share her love of having ideas and making and doing.  She clearly has too much time for having ideas at present.  That is when the list making starts again, and I need to tell her to stop it.  Listing doesn’t actually achieve anything because when ‘school is out’ and she can tear into active stuff, real life demands that other priorities arise, there is a different order to life than you can determine by making a list.  Lists are good for going to the supermarket and there it ends.

F also knows, but doesn’t always work to it, that really successful people list not what they want or need to do, but how they want or need to be, or where they want to be in life and then do what is necessary to get there.

When I ask her about that, F says she wants to be where life has fewer passwords.  Passwords? Whatever does she mean?