Catching Days by Catherine Johnson

In her treatise The Writing Life, Annie Dillard notably wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our life. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.”

There is a lot of concern right now about how we spend our days, worry over wasting time. Some headlines: “How to make the most of time spent social distancing,” “How to pass the time productively during your coronavirus self-quarantine,” “Turn your self-imposed quarantine into a career-redefining opportunity with these courses,” “60 productive ways to spend time when you’re social distancing.” Writers on Twitter remind us that Shakespeare wrote King Lear during quarantine from the Bubonic Plague.

In the face of disruption and uncertainty, we are told to keep a schedule and routine. Put pants on. Brush your hair. This will keep us tethered to normalcy. I teach at a university and I pass this on to my students as good advice. I’m trying to be something constant and reliable for them. Give them resources for making it through. But as someone who has spent the better part of her adult life married to her schedule, for fear of falling back into the chaos that defined my own college years, I’m contemplating a temporary separation. Wondering if, just when I might need it most, my schedule’s usefulness has expired.

At the beginning of the year, the comfort I used to find in waking up to a pre-planned day, no need to think, just dutifully execute, was already starting to wane. Starting to feel like a constriction. Spontaneity was akin to betrayal. Then I started dating someone. Then the world shut down. And the combination of quarantine + new relationship = perfect storm for becoming unhinged.

§

I am a lister. Sometimes little clusters on the same scrap of paper, separated into categories. Sometimes I scribble one long list of everything that comes to mind while I’m doing other things—groceries, to-dos, life goals.

……….text Elsie
……….tomatoes
……….write poetry

I keep a list of all the books I intend to read each year (Team of Rivals, The Brothers Karamazov, 1Q84); movies and TV shows to watch (After Truth, Devs, Succession); purchases I’d like to make (purple hoodie, spice rack, yoga blanket); mountains I want to climb (Table Mountain, Silver Star, Blacktooth Mountain); restaurants I’d like to take my parents (Tin Table, Oak, Capitol Cider). I keep a list of gifts to get my family and friends for birthdays and Christmas. I take deep pleasure in checking off boxes.

Lists keep me moored. Writing something down is the first step toward actualization. Not that these things always happen. Writing poetry is always on the list; I haven’t written a poem in ten years. But writing it down opens it to possibility.

Sometimes lists are an unhelpful compulsion. Mental lists of foods I should or should not eat, have eaten and/or will/should eat. Lists of exercises I should do more of. Lists of good habits to maximize and bad habits to minimize and a ticking counter of how these choices are visible in the composition of my body. Too much here, not enough there. Sometimes these lists are so loud I can’t hear reality. On a good day, these lists softly babble to themselves in the background. You could say I have control issues.

My apartment is a refuge of order. I like to think of myself as a minimalist; at least, everything has a reason to be where it is. No excess. I will organize the magazines so that they are perfectly parallel with the sides of the end table and everything adjacent has a clearly-defined margin of space around it. Everything as it should be.

The same way I list excessively and organize my space neurotically, I will plan each hour of my day weeks in advance (When will I write? When will I exercise? When will I meditate? When will I grade papers?). Listing and scheduling are my henchmen for control.

I wasn’t always a lister and planner. But after my binge-drinking-pot-smoking-financially-careless-romantically-disastrous-freshman and sophomore years of college, I began to adopt a code of discipline, a devotion to efficiency. Straight A’s, multiple jobs, extracurricular activities. I was determined to repent for the days I wasted partying with my no-good boyfriend and failing classes. And I did—until I didn’t. My twenties rolled along and I oscillated between one extreme and the other. Responsible, shit-together, on-top-of-it, graduate student, then falling off the wagon, drinking and smoking to forget that I didn’t know what I wanted, to cope with another dysfunctional relationship. By the time I turned thirty I was exhausted by this see-saw. It was time to earnestly make something of myself, my life. Specifically, I wanted to live a creative life.

I took Dillard’s notion that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our life”—seriously. In fact, I had to work extra hard to compensate for all the time already wasted—and waste is anything that isn’t productive, useful, active. Anything that doesn’t make me better, stronger, more prolific. I read all the books, listened to all the podcasts, poured through all the data on what makes a person creative (10,000 hours, get enough sleep, daily practice, etc.). I combed through the routines of famous artists. Beethoven took long walks after lunch, pen and pencil in hand, as did Gustav Mahler; Ernest Hemingway got up every morning at dawn; David Lynch has meditated twice a day for the last 45 years. The poet W.H. Auden declared: “Decide what you want or ought to do with the day, then always do it at exactly the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble.” I employed tactic after tactic like a diligent student.

Likewise, I disciplined my body, not only to “cleanse” it from my previous binges, but as the vessel for creativity, hoping to foster the perfect conditions for inspiration. Or—when I was feeling frustrated with my creative output, my body became a stand-in canvas, an alternative medium to shape and control when other parts of my life seemed lacking.

So my schedule used to consist of 6am alarms and 9pm bedtimes; writing every day; intermittent fasting and gluten-free whole raw vegan foods; daily meditation and yoga; coffee only on the weekends and one glass of wine on Friday night; the workday ended at 5pm, dinner by 6pm, reading until sleep. Life-hacking. Mushroom supplements. Show me a longevity study and I will jump on the band-wagon. Everything in moderation. Maintain equilibrium, balance. Stay “centered,” “grounded.” Optimize.

§

In my last relationship, part of the attraction, I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit, was our domestic compatibility. I never lived with him, but I could imagine it. He owned even less than I did and had better interior decorating sense. Mid-century modern sofa, tasteful accent rug, precisely appointed plants. We fantasized about a Vitamix with a 3 peak output horsepower motor (for our green smoothies) in a clutter-free kitchen with stainless steel cookware and a perfectly-seasoned cast iron skillet (in which we’d cook our backyard free-range eggs and sauté local organic vegetables). We indulged one another’s neurosis. We never fought. He did not challenge my control issues; he didn’t challenge me at all. It was safe. Predictable.

In comparison to my tightly-wound way of existing, the person I met in February is chaos. All open cupboards, mounting dishes in the sink, clean clothes on the floor, scattered half-empty glasses and cans, not-even-piles of paper, toy trains, and trucks under every foot. No recipes, only let’s-try-a-little-of-this. Rarely on time, everything at the last minute, always “one more thing to do” and “have you seen my…?” I asked him if he ever makes to-do lists and he replied, without missing a beat: “No, it’s on my to-do list.”

He might not be creative because of this madness, but he is indisputably creative and generative amidst the madness in a way that I envy. While I follow Smitten Kitchen recipes to a T, preparing and organizing ingredients, lining up the chopped onions and minced garlic and diced sweet potato in small bowls TV cooking show-style, wiping down counters and cutting boards and cleaning as I go—his kitchen is a war zone of constant bread-baking, sticky sourdough starters oozing from tupperware, flour-crusted countertops. I stray from instructions with trepidation; he experiments. I’m watching the clock every time I sit down to write; he is song-writing until 2am and has no idea where the time went. I judge every word before I write it; he is not afraid to sing badly.

The more time I spend in his orb, the more I detect an inner loosening, releasing. I see that there are other options, other ways to live. Being around him initially stoked my anxiety, my desperate need to organize and categorize. Now I’m finding relief from my own micro-managing. Despite my particularness, I can be flexible when I want to be. I am an adept traveler, eager to leave my comforts and customs at home and immerse myself in new surroundings. Lose myself for the sake of a new experience, a different perspective. Every day with him I’m in a foreign country, a little lost. I am routinely coaxed into breaking my “rules.” I am terrified and so grateful. Chaos is what I fear and crave the most.

And yet, while part of me is relishing this permission to live differently and relax, the uncertainty of quarantine (Is my university job really secure? What will this actually mean for the economy in the small university town where I live? Will my parents make it through this?) and the uncertainty of a new relationship (Can someone like him be with someone as wound up as me? Is it a matter of time before this whole thing blows up in my face? Is this just a quarantine affair?) are tempting another part of me to hold on to those lists even tighter.

Because I cannot plan for a month from now and I dare not plan for six months from now, my color-coded, list-embedded Google calendar has become a testament to how I’ve spent my days, a record. I add things to it after they’ve already happened, just to fill up all available blank space (soak chickpeas, restring guitar, do laundry). As the days lose definition, I try harder to make them distinct. That was the day I watered the plants, called Dad and finished reading Into Thin Air—as if that will mean something a year from now. Really it’s just a way of confirming that I existed. An existential anchor.

On my list of intentions for 2020 is to reread books I love. (I almost never reread; I’m too eager to check off a new one.) I went back to Thomas Merton’s No Man Is an Island, in which he writes:

“The fact that our being necessarily demands to be expressed in action should not lead us to believe that as soon as we stop acting we cease to exist. We do not live merely in order to ‘do something’—no matter what…We do not live more fully merely by doing more, seeing more, tasting more, and experiencing more than we ever have before. On the contrary, some of us need to discover that we will not begin to live more fully until we have the courage to do and see and taste and experience much less than usual.”

Merton confirms my hunch that doing is about self-validation. Scheduling and listing reassure me that I’m doing life to the best of my ability because I’m doing. But doing isn’t necessarily living. In fact, what if this obsession with doing is preventing me from living the creative life I want? There are times when I opt not to write because cleaning my apartment or checking email provides the instant gratification of accomplishment. The seductive veneer of productivity. Whereas writing is hard and emotionally taxing, a practice that just as often (if not more so) fills me with self-doubt and anxiety and the pang of not measuring up to what I want my work to be. So what if my fear of wasting time, or really, my addiction to completing small tasks, is undermining the very thing I’m striving for? What if my desire for self-validation has overtaken my will to do the messy, uncomfortable work that I actually want to fill my days?

Chaos is not, as I had assumed, an abundance of frenetic uncontrollable, disorderly energy. It’s from the Greek khaos meaning: “abyss, that which gapes wide open, that which is vast and empty.” In theological use: “the void at the beginning of creation, the confused, formless, elementary state of the universe” and “primeval emptiness.” I thought I was fighting off disorder, but maybe I’ve been fighting off the very stillness, the emptiness, necessary in order to create.

When I first read Dillard’s invitation to spend our days as we would spend our lives, I thought this was simply a challenge to live productively. To make the things we love a regular part of our schedules. But she goes on to say: “A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.”

Dillard points out the artifice of the schedule. It is a “peace and haven” but also a “lifeboat.” A lifeboat is a temporary craft for survival; one is not meant to live on it forever. In this passage, I detect something almost sinister about keeping a schedule, everyday the same. Something ominous about a “blurred and powerful pattern.” Maybe Dillard was pointing at two truths in tension: that the things you do regularly and repeatedly are what create the general shape and contours of one’s life and it’s just as important to not be held hostage by this illusion of control. To understand the schedule might save you from a constant, overwhelming confrontation with chaos, but swimming in the chaos is also where life happens, where creativity happens. A creative life, then, at least to a certain extent, is a chaotic one. And sometimes chaos means doing nothing.

I understand why people say maintaining structure is important during this pandemic. But for me it has been an opportunity to let go, to try a new way of being, or to just be.

I still think there is some utility in keeping a schedule. But it shouldn’t always be followed dogmatically; one’s routine can change as the rhythm of life changes.

Now, the day starts whenever I wake-up and I just do my best to keep going. Coffee is an essential daily ritual. I spend two hours in my pajamas, puttering around my apartment, or reading and writing, which I’m doing a lot more of now—not out of some contrived, forced discipline, but because it’s one of the few spaces of genuine comfort. I usually muster the motivation to exercise around noon, but sometimes not and I’m OK with that. Sometimes I choose stillness instead. Sometimes I sit on my couch and think. I work in the afternoons because I’m lucky enough to still have a job and I have to show up for my students. I used to be at least a week ahead of everything. Now it’s What do I have to do today? Days that used to be crafted with precision and purpose, are now Do whatever you can do whenever you can do it. When I lose steam I close my laptop for the day, open a can of pinot noir, and start making dinner with the new guy, the only person I see face-to-face. I still cling to some of my obsessive healthy eating habits (the fear of losing control is ever floating in the background), but I’m grateful for the ways he encourages me to relax, let go, even if that’s just by eating a slice of his sourdough bread.

I’m still sometimes shocked or even disgruntled by his chaos, but there are good reasons for it. My schedule offers me proof of my own self-centered, isolated existence; his scatteredness is evidence of his generosity, how much he does and cares for others— his toddler son, his own students, his friends and family and community.

Some days I don’t know where the ground is. I remind myself that I need chaos in my life—be it in human or some other form. I cannot list or schedule my way into security. And I’ve come to think that the subtext of a schedule filled with color-coded appointments and completed tasks is not necessarily a creative life, but a fearful one. And that is not how I want to spend my days.

Catherine Johnson’s writing has been published in Oregon Humanities, Propeller, Gulf Stream, STORGY, Portland Monthly Magazine, Nowhere Travel Magazine, Elephant Journal, District Lines and is forthcoming in Scabland Books’ anthology Evergreen: Fairy Tales, Essays & Fables from the Dark Northwest. She teaches at the University of Wyoming in Laramie.