List Items

One of my favorite things to do is to create lists. I don’t mean practical lists, like shopping lists or to-do lists. I know people who live their lives by these lists, who experience a great deal of personal satisfaction in placing little checkmarks on handwritten lines. I mean no disrespect to such people. In fact, I admire the ability to track, and then accomplish, all one’s weekly tasks, or to go to the grocery store with a complete list and come away with exactly what was on the list and no more. I can’t do either of those things, and I have tried. Those are not the kinds of lists that give me satisfaction. I like making lists that tell me something about myself—books I’ve read, places I’ve been, roommates I’ve had. These kinds of lists are some small chronicle of my existence, and they say something about where I’ve been and who I am, and maybe even about where I haven’t been and who I want to become.

I have a few formal lists hanging around, but they’re mostly lists of books. There’s the Books I’ve Read list, for which I’m on my third year, or the Movies I’ve Seen list that I began keeping with my books list last year. There’s the Books I Own list, mostly for cataloguing purposes to keep order when I move, and the Books I Want to Read to My Children list, and the Books I Want to Read (for myself) list.

Books I have read more than twice
The Island and the Ring by Laura C. Stevenson
The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
The Phantom Toll Booth by Norman Juster
The Giver by Lois Lowry

I also have some informal lists, that I will construct in my head, but which are never quite complete. The most interesting one is the slowly evolving Things I Want to Do Before I Die list, but others are much more mundane.

Companies for which I willingly admit to being a loyal customer
Gap
Target
Macey’s
Great Harvest Bread Co.
Apple
Borders

And there are more concrete, chronological lists that in some way track my path through life. I have never, ever actually written down the list of Boys I’ve Had Crushes On, but I sure get a kick out of thinking about it occasionally. Others are less interesting, but I’m a bit more willing to share.

Places I Have Lived
Bloomington, Indiana
Chicago, Illinois
Littleton, Colorado
La Crescenta, California
Provo, Utah
Madrid, Spain
Falls Church, Virginia
Ann Arbor, Michigan

There are also day-to-day activities that comprise list-making, in a sense, like compiling my iTunes playlists, or organizing my photos, or my ongoing cookbook project. And then of course there are the lists that actually have purpose to them, lists like Things I’m Grateful For, or Habits I Want to Get Into (or keep up, as the case may be), or Scripture References that Focus on Overcoming Fear. They are the lists that help me get to where I’m going more than detailing where I’ve been.

I read a short story once in which an elderly man was obsessively scrawling out his life in lists on small pieces of paper and earnestly distributing these lists to complete strangers. This story struck me at a surprisingly deep level. We spend a lot of time trying to make meaning of our lives, putting our experiences into narratives, chronologies, scrapbooks. We all have our own catalogue of stories that we call upon when the conversation makes just the right turn (I have the Why-I-Moved-to-Michigan story, the Forgetting-a-Student’s-Name story, the They-Can-Fine-You-For-Going-In-the-Out-Door story, the Getting-Asked-Out-at-the-BYU-Swimming-Pool story) all of which have, through multiple retellings, evolved into entities that are meaningful beyond the event that inspired them in the first place, and have themselves become frameworks for understanding new stories as they occur. Lists do the same thing—they order and prioritize and make sense of things that don’t always have inherent sense to them.

I think that’s why I like making lists so much. Life is inherently messy and confusing, but I believe in an inherent order and purpose to things that happen. But we can’t usually see the purpose in the moment—what little glimpses we get of that purpose come from our own efforts to put our lives in position and make sense out of what we know.