Hello and welcome to navel gazing. I'm John Dickerson. This is episode six of season one.

The notebook entry that begins our episode comes from Notebook 75, pages 8 and 9 from September 2021.

It is not a quote, or an observation, or a useful number.

It is a list of tasks.

It reads,

reinstating the Pomodoro routine.

Start Marshall again.

Write Bryce.

Send Laura the larger project list.

Work on budget to get accounts in order. Meditation pillow upstairs.

A fellow with that list needs a meditation pillow upstairs, and maybe one downstairs, and maybe one

on every floor. You would recognize this entry in the notebook as a to-do list, and so it is, from that same period of entries in September 2021 that we have been looking at in this exercise of long-looking.

This set of directives follows my reminder to myself in the last episode to write an onboarding memo for my colleague Laura Dohn.

It affirms our speculation from the last episode that getting things in order for my colleague

masked my deeper need to get things in order for myself.

What do the items in this list mean?

I will pierce the text with analysis in a moment, but in the

largest sense, this list is a defeat. A droopy bike tire, a waistband with no tone, a list of three

where a list of two would have been sufficient. Anyone who has wrestled with a to-do list knows a to-do list is a defeat. Why is this the case?

Because for most of us, writing the items on the to-do list becomes the psychological stand-in

for completing the tasks on the to-do list. It slakes our thirst to do something, and then, because

verily it was a shallow thirst, we don't do

...