To-Do-List Eli
There’s a version of myself that I like to call To-Do-List Eli. To-Do-List Eli (TDLE, for short) speaks six languages, has read everything by Nabokov, and didn’t give up jazz trumpet in college. TDLE knows at least four reasonably good card tricks, plays the banjo, journals nightly, and can build functional web applications. TDLE keeps in close touch with friends, competently manages his personal finances, and wrote this essay three weeks ago.
I’ve been thinking of late about TDLE because this is the season of his greatest triumph. Sometime in May, when the days grow long and a robotically uttered What are you up to this summer? becomes the de rigueur icebreaker of uninspired conversation, TDLE awakes from wintry quiescence. In a flash, TDLE charts out a brilliant vision of the summer to come. Last year, TDLE planned to brush up on Spanish, launch a podcast, and learn how to drive stick. This summer remains a work in progress, but if over the next few weeks you receive an invitation from TDLE advertising a summer backpacking escapade, I’d advise skepticism.
June is the longest day of summer’s promise. Even TDLE is content to kick up his legs, sip a beer, breathe deeply of the floral air. I do the same and, if only for a moment, can’t help but believe in the possibility of return — return to the pre-to-do-list, cricket-chorus nights of my childhood home in western Massachusetts, to the sunbaked cabins of sleep-away camp, to the balsam fir scent of my grandparents’ Maine cottage, to callused feet and pruned skin and the bronzed color I carried back to school like a prize.
And then, July, and the summer is upon us. Somewhere, TDLE is scratching out his first banjo licks and catching up with old friends. As for me, the source of my underachievement flows unabated. My days are manifold but bear no resemblance to my to-do list: I read aimlessly, think aimlessly, do aimlessly. I wonder: Am I failing to self-actualize? Or am I self-actualizing as a failure?
I wonder: Am I failing to self-actualize? Or am I self-actualizing as a failure?
Or maybe my aspirations were misinformed? Could it be that I don’t really care so much about learning Javascript, or writing poems, or understanding statistics? That my compulsion to set goals is fueled less by a desire to achieve any specific thing, and more by a general desire to desire? Am I falling short of my aspirations? Or am I realizing that my aspirations fall short?
By August, TDLE is an insufferable polymath. Methodically, he has worked through goals in five categories: Writing (“writers write!”), “healthy living,” “professional,” “friends and family,” and “service.” He has avoided dairy, volunteered at a homeless shelter, and achieved a certificate of commendation for an online course in machine learning.
By September, I’ve ticked off little of my list of pre-summer goals. But I have spent three nights alone in the Eastern Sierra, bushwhacking up rock-strewn peaks and diving ravenously into alpine lakes. I’ve hopped a last-minute flight to New York to catch up with a long-lost friend. I’ve read a few good books, written a poem or two, strummed a new song on the guitar.
I (TDLE) tried to chart out a summer in one way, and I (Eli) ended up living that summer in another. I imagine us as two clowns in a car — TDLE in the navigator’s seat, furiously shouting directions, and me in the driver’s seat, occasionally following but mostly turning by feel. It strikes me that this is an insane way to drive — or to plan a life — but I can’t help it. Dare I risk jettisoning my passenger, knowing that some of his directions may be right? Sensing that it is perhaps only because he exists that I drive at all?
And so I imagine we’ll drive on, TDLE and I. He roaring directions from the passenger’s seat, I turning left and right to the tick of some ineffable metronome of the soul, the two of us carrying on and on until we can go no longer.
