Make a List

How a Simple Practice Can Change Our Lives and Open Our Hearts

Marilyn McEntyre

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9781467449595
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Creative Writing

What if writing a list could literally change your life??

From the ancient book of Numbers to the latest clickbait listicle, list-writing has been a routine feature of human experience. Shopping lists. To-do lists. Guest lists. Bucket lists. Lists are everywhere you look.?

But what if our lists did more than just remind us to buy milk and take out the trash? What if the practice of list-making could help us discover who we truly are and even point us to our deepest joys, hopes, and desires??

In  Make a List teacher, writer, and wordsmith Marilyn McEntyre shows readers how the simple act of writing a list can open doors to personal discovery and spiritual growth. Deepening her reflections with abundant writing prompts and real-life examples, McEntyre turns the humble list into a work of art—one that has the power to clear minds, open hearts, and change lives.

Part I

WHY MAKE A LIST?

Since the purposes that lists serve are so various, this section offers some reflections on particular kinds of lists and the insights and satisfactions they can provide. Naming what we want, what we feel, what we’re afraid of, naming the uncertainties or delights or questions that come to mind in the moment can help us take stock of our own shifting priorities, our progress or growth in certain areas, and where we may need to re-awaken and pay closer attention to what we’ve sidelined. Lists beget other lists, as do questions. There are scores of answers to “Why Make a List?” Here are a few.

TO DISCOVER SUBTLE LAYERS OF FEELING

List-making slows you down. You may find your pen hovering in the air above the page or your fingers resting before returning to the keyboard as you ponder what you just put down. You hadn’t realized you felt that way. You hadn’t known what rush of memory a particular word would trigger—perhaps a well-concealed wistfulness about a road not taken, or an edgy uncertainty about something you haven’t fully faced, or an unexpected delight that motivates you to explore further something you may have been postponing for a more opportune time. This may be that time.

When I wrote a list entitled “What love looks like,” for instance, I began to realize and appreciate in new ways the kinds of attention I’d received from people over the years who I wouldn’t have said loved me, but who enhanced my life and learning in ways I now indeed would call love. “A babysitter building a block tower,” “A white-haired woman in the picket line,” “A seventh-grade soccer coach on Saturday morning”—all embody a kind of generosity and care for others’ welfare that links love to kindness, justice, and patience.

The great definition of love in 1 Corinthians 13, recited at many weddings but meant as a general guide for loving life and each other all the time, includes these lines: “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.” As I made my list, those lines came to mind, and along with them, recollections of occasions when someone showed me what patience, kindness, humility, and good-humored grace look like in the flesh. That list led me down pathways of gratitude I had never fully explored.

As I wrote a line about a grandpa reading, I found myself smiling over the image, since so much of the love I experienced as a child happened as I snuggled onto someone’s lap or leaned into a shoulder and listened to a story. And as it occurred to me to include “a monk at prayer” in the list of those who embody love, I thought of all the quiet, unobtrusive, faithful people I have known who have lit my path with love in ways I barely recognized until later.

The act of making this list makes me newly aware of dimensions of love I rarely recognize—quiet sacrifice, willingness to correct, exuberance, attention to details, laughter. The feelings that arose in the process were the reward for this little exercise. As with many of the lists I look back on, this one seems to offer a kind of archaeological record of emotions felt and refined over the years into more nuanced, rich, colorful experiences.

What love looks like

A seventh-grade soccer coach on Saturday morning

A night nurse changing bandages

A teacher tutoring at lunchtime

A worried parent at three a.m.

A white-haired woman in a picket line

A grandpa reading a storybook instead of the evening paper

A vet who talks to the kitty

A monk at prayer

A babysitter building a block tower

A donor at the blood bank

A husband brewing coffee at six a.m.

A volunteer cutting carrots in the soup kitchen

A sister listening to late-night laments

A mom who says no and finds a yes to go with it

A policy-maker who remembers the poor

SOME LISTS TO TRY:

Seven kinds of satisfaction

What’s underneath the anger

What happens in the aftermath

Feelings I tend to suppress

When I am most content

TO NAME WHAT YOU WANT

Knowing what you want isn’t as simple or obvious a matter as it might seem. You might fall into a restless, itchy state of discontent or a vague, unspecified wanting during which you find yourself musing in front of an open refrigerator or closet or door, wondering what satisfaction would look like. That kind of unfocused wanting is a very common problem—particularly among those of us who live in conditions of chronic choice overload.

One solution to that problem may be a list. Pen in hand, line by line, you can get from “I don’t know what I want” to “I know I want these things.” It’s like moving out of a confusing fog into a clear landscape of possibility. Once you know what you want (even if you think you shouldn’t want it, and have therefore been repressing the wanting), the next steps become clearer. If it’s a vacation, you can check the calendar, review your cash flow, and begin to plan. If it’s learning to swing dance, you can look for local classes online and consider how to make room for lessons in your life. If it’s a closer relationship with your spouse, you can make an occasion for the conversation you’ve been postponing, or a special dinner just for the two of you. If it’s a deeper spiritual life, you can make a list (!) of the books others have recommended, or take a day at a retreat center or an hour at a lakeside for quiet prayer or meditation. Whatever your wants, listing them can not only give direction but also unleash the energy you need to move in that direction.

Of course, wants change over time, sometimes without our fully realizing it. It may dawn upon us gradually that the car we thought we were “saving up for” or the trip we hoped to take before older age is no longer appealing. Now we find ourselves with other wants. They may be focused less on things and more on making time and space for friendship, developing dormant talents, learning new skills, finding companionship in conversation, nurturing our spiritual growth. Or it may be that persistent desires we have dismissed as trivial deserve some attention: a new hairstyle, a different color on the walls, raised beds in the garden, the one piece of jewelry it’s always felt excessive to ask for, conversation with a growing child about something we rarely broach.

I recognize that my wants have changed over the past decade; they’re simpler in some ways, more focused on less—fewer commitments, fewer things to take care of—and clearer about desires I would call “inner” or “spiritual”—time, space, silence, reflection, time with friends. Here’s a recent list:

What I want now

Quiet companionship

Good walking shoes

Candlelight every evening

Good coffee every morning

Time to read

And reread

Energy to care for those who need my care

Podcasts worth pondering

Suppers and song with people I love

This list included lines that, as they occurred to me, helped me recognize that shift. And I realized that I already had some of these things, which made me aware again of a simple, lovely, useful definition of contentment: wanting what you have.

The “Now” is an important part of this list’s title. Noticing how wants change is important information for us and for those who know us best. It’s so easy to think we have ourselves or our loved ones “pegged.” But they can surprise us, and we can surprise ourselves. That’s why naming wants can be revelatory. We discover that we want something we hadn’t quite bothered—or been brave enough—to identify. We find ourselves wanting with more wistfulness or urgency or eagerness than we had realized.

These wants inspire other variants of the “What I want” list: “What I want right now”; “What I want but hesitate to ask for”; “What I want but am embarrassed to ask for”; “What I want to want”; “What I wish I didn’t want”; “What I want for the people I love.” It’s important to consider these and other explorations of wanting as a dimension of inner life. The more we list various kinds of wants, the more we discover that desire itself is a life force. The blissful state of wanting nothing may be a valuable ideal and a mark of spiritual advancement, but it’s unlikely that we’ll be able even to approximate that kind of holy contentment without first and fully acknowledging the desires that drive us, sometimes getting us into trouble, sometimes teaching us. Knowing the good we do want can temper and direct these desires, and is a helpful step in learning what we should want. It’s part of the process of learning to want the best things, of educating our desires.

Of course, even when we bring all this awareness to our wanting, we may not get everything we want. But knowing what we want helps us consider what’s possible and also recognize what we may simply need to let go of. I may want to learn to make and glaze a pot, but given all the other things I want, that may just not happen. So I’ll admire other people’s pots and go on with my limited life. Lists help me do that. They also help fuel hopes, showing us that there are any number of things we can learn and try and enjoy more fully. To look them in the face is to greet them, in a way, and to honor them, and to move in their direction.

SOME LISTS TO TRY:

Things I’ve begun wanting recently

Things I’ve wanted for the last five minutes

Things I’ve wanted for more than five years

Things I want for the next generation

Things I’d like to stop wanting

TO CLARIFY YOUR CONCERNS

Whether or not you set out to make a list of current concerns, as soon as you set out to make a list at all, they’re likely to come up. When you make a list, you open a space in which things can bubble up from where they’ve lain trapped in pockets under the surface of consciousness. Fears, especially, often go unnamed because they’re hard to face and easy to hide behind the false comfort of denial. Guilt and regret also get pushed underground, and anxieties about others’ lives that we can’t do much about, and discontents that seem a little dangerous to explore. So, for example, my current list of concerns might look something like this:

This season’s concerns

The dying of a dear one

Information overload

Climate change and carbon footprints

A friend’s divorce

My spouse’s discouragements

And my own

How to find time for what I treasure

And silence ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Living by Lists
• Part I: Why Make a List?: Lists serve a surprising variety of purposes. Here are a few reasons to make them.
• Part II: The Way of the List-­Maker: There aren’t many “rules” in list-­making, but there are reliable ways to make lists useful, beautiful, and fun. Here are a few to try out.
• Part III: Play Lists: Lists are a way of opening up “play space.” This section is an invitation to play—to tinker with each other’s lists, to use the ones provided here as templates for your own, to move lines around and change the mood and marvel at your own ingenuity. Consider, as you read these lists and the short reflections that follow each of them, where whimsy, need, poetic inclinations, and playful imagination might take you.
• Appendix: A Few Final Lists for Your General Enjoyment