Piling Up

Somedays I wonder if my life isn’t controlled by the numbers.

Five new emails. Three texts waiting. Two new notifications. Unread counts, piles of books, stacks of unfinished work. All calling out, imploring, demanding to be taken care of, trimmed down, and finished. all waiting to be ticked off and made into a zero.

Most of the time, I dutifully comply. I’ll jump from one pile to the next, reading, deleting, replying, making lists and little reminders of what I need to do. And when I’ve finally struck payload, and hit that satisfying zero, there’s a moment of satisfaction, a feeling of accomplishment.

For a moment at least. Because when you’ve let your life be dictated by a pile of stuff demanding your attention, you find yourself wanting when that pile has been churned through and taken care of. Where’s the next task to mark complete? Where’s the next fire to put out? I’ll find myself almost mindlessly refreshing my email at times, almost out of desperation.

Then there are the times when one of these boxes goes rancid; perhaps there’s something, or everything, that I just don’t want to think about. Or perhaps instead this list of things is uninteresting, but I just can’t bear to toss it, out of sentiment or out of some notion of duty. The piles get larger and larger, my mind devotes more and more time thinking about not thinking about it, and suddenly the levee breaks and I spend a whole week getting no sleep trying to catch up on all the things I’ve been avoiding.

This behavior is worrisome, to say the least. I’ve spent a lot of time cultivating the piles just so, doing my best to make sure that whatever goes into them deserves my time and attention. And for the most part, that is true.

Still, so many days I just feel like I’m shoveling, that I’m somehow digging myself out of a pileup of the work I find important. Except, it really feels like I’m digging myself into the muck of work that I have no control over. That I’ve given myself over to these counts, these lists, these boxes of stuff, and in doing so I’ve given up all control of what I do with my time. That suddenly all these interests have turned into obligations and now there’s nothing to do but tackle each in succession, chipping away until there’s nothing left to accomplish.

It’s become untenable, because that’s no way to travel through life. I want purpose to arise out of the actions I choose to make, not the obligations that have landed at my feet. There’s got to be another way, and I think it starts by getting rid of the entire notion of these piles.