freedom in scheduling

Karen is thinking and writing about some great thoughts. I have had an absolutely terrible time over the last year with trying to put my days together in a way that is fruitful and life giving. I'm encouraged to think about what Karen is saying.

Now I can look at discipline as a friend, as Dillard put it, a scaffolding just as the word “rule” is to mean “trellis” or “guide”. Discipline keeps me tethered when I am tempted to run from these ordinary tasks that make up most of my days. I look at the color-coded schedules and to do lists of my youth with great weariness. How I spent my days then did not lead me to life but mere accomplishment. Now I see a schedule, a disciplined life as a tool to keep me from foolish idolatries of how much and how many. Discipline is just a way to wear the right shoes or have on a good pair of glasses. All the better to see you with my dear.

I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands in sections of time.

A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order-willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.

-Annie Dillard