The list is still on the fridge, under the magnet from the time your sister went to Italy. Plan the hiking trip with the friends from college. Get the tomatoes in before it gets too hot. Clear the room with the boxes in it. That’s the room you’ve been calling the office for four years.
You wrote it in June with the back door open and the evening still going at nine o'clock. It’s September now and every line on it is exactly where you left it.
What you were really writing
Read it again and notice that almost nothing on it is a task.
Clear the room isn’t a task. It has no start, no end, and no moment where anything is different afterward. The same goes for get back into the garden, and for be better about calling people. What you wrote in June was a description of a person. Somebody who organizes the trip. Somebody who grows tomatoes. Somebody who has a room they can walk into without turning the light off again.
That person is real. That’s you on a good week, and you’ve been them before, which makes the list so easy to write and so impossible to start.
There’s a second thing working against you, and it has nothing to do with wanting it. Our sense of how much time has gone by, and how much is left, runs differently from everybody else's. Estimating an interval, holding on to how long something took, managing the hours inside a day, all of it takes more from us than it takes from the person next to us.
So the summer never announced itself. There was no Tuesday in late July that arrived as information, six weeks gone and six to go. It was June, and then it was the week the school emails started, and the list on the fridge hadn’t moved because nothing had ever told you it was time.
