Letting go of your list

I’ve been a great believer in lists for most of my life. They help organise the mind, prioritise tasks and prevent important things from being forgotten in the mad rush of modern life. But lately I’ve been asking myself if perhaps the keeping of lists can go a little too far. 

Over the years I’ve developed the habit of writing a new daily list as I sip my morning coffee; it joins my home list, shopping list and personal list in a special notebook kept for the purpose, and it’s a very rare day that I do not consult with it. My grandmother is even worse: sometimes when she completes a task that wasn’t on her list, she adds it just so that she can have the satisfaction of crossing it off!

What is this satisfaction we feel when we accomplish a task? Well apparently when we complete something we set out to our bodies release dopamine. Dopamine is the body’s reward system: it feels great and it’s very addictive!

To make this addiction all the more compelling, we’ve been taught from a very young age that society respects people who ‘get things done’, even when the things they do are not necessarily beneficial to that society. Our need for social and familial approval adds to the dopamine craving, making our behaviour fixated and largely an unconscious reaction to stimulus.

List keeping becomes toxic when it becomes either an anchor or a shackle:

• When you feel that your list is keeping you from losing control you are using it as an anchor. It is your safety net. You are holding onto that list for dear life because you're afraid that if you let go things may become messy and chaotic.

• On the other hand your list may have become a heavy burden. You dread looking at it, knowing there are too many things on there that you either do not wish to do, feel too exhausted to do or simply do not have the time for. Your list is a chain around your neck; you are no longer free.

If either of these scenarios rings true, it may be time to look closely at your relationships to lists. Ask yourself a few pertinent questions:

• Are the things on your list actually the things you’d like to spend your time (life) doing?
• What exactly will doing these things achieve? Is it worth the time and energy invested?
• Do you experience guilt or shame when you fail to complete the tasks on your list?
• Do you project these negative emotions on to your loved ones in the form of resentment, irritability, blaming or demands?
• Do you feel a sense of panic when you get to work and realise you’ve left your list on the kitchen table?
• Do you feel you could spend a whole weekend without writing or referring to a list?
• Are your lists recycled – are there things on there that you wanted to complete a year ago but haven’t been able to? Is it time to let go of them, or face-up and make them happen?
• Do you ever miss an opportunity to act spontaneously, perhaps enjoying a moment of synchronicity, because you are too fixated on your list?
• Do you consult you list just so you can cross something off, even if you already know what your next task must be?
• Do you sometimes feel frustrated by circumstances when they interfere with the completion of tasks, even when the turn of events is a happy one, such as the arrival of guests?

Of course there are many good reasons to complete tasks: to serve others, to move towards our goals or simply because they're a part of the necessities of life. And of course a list is a valuable tool that can help us complete these tasks efficiently. But just as you wouldn’t use an axe to cut off your fingers and toes, you don’t need to use your list as a safety blanket or a shackle.

Letting go of your list can be an intensely liberating experience. Strangely enough the world doesn’t fall apart around you. Things continue to get done, your loved ones go to bed sweet smelling and well fed. In fact you may find yourself acting more spontaneously, noticing opportunities and using your intuition to guide you. By staying present and acting as the situation calls you to, rather than trying to force time and space into the format of your list, you allow life to open up in new and beautiful ways.

Letting go of needs in relationship

There’s many a pop-psychology and self-help book that advocates making sure your needs are met in relationship. Many don’t go so far as to say we should expect this directly from our lover; but they do set up the expectation that the relationship itself should meet our needs.

Expectations ruin relationships. This is how it works in a so-called ‘romance’. You meet someone and because you’re both open, and there’s some resonance between you, you connect. But very soon instead of simply enjoying the other person’s company you’re asking yourself if you have a future with them. From that point on you’re constantly checking to see if the person you’re with is living up to your internal image of the person you want to ‘spend the rest of your life with.’ (Isn’t that an awful expression? Spending the rest of your life!) Many couples are still checking their internal image decades into a so-called happy-ever-after.

It’s all pretty narcissistic isn’t it? Especially when you ask yourself a few hard questions: Are you meeting all of their needs? Do you have all the qualities you assign to the perfect lover? Maybe we should become perfect ourselves before we demand it from another.

All day long we tell ourselves and others all about our needs. But are they real?

• I need a coffee
• I need to get this done
• I need him to be more affectionate

Do we really need any of these things? What about these?

• I need to change my reaction to anger
• I need to get out of this relationship
• I need to tell my mother how I feel

These latter could indeed be said to be needs. But when we use the powerful word ‘need’ we create a bond that inhibits growth; better to say the same thing in the affirmative:

• I can change my reaction to anger 
• I would like to make some changes in this relationship
• I will tell my mother how I feel

So really we can probably get rid of most so-called ‘needs’ in relationship, being careful not to throw out the real ones: safety of body, mind and soul, respect, honesty, learning and growth, connection and communication.

When you let go of pseudo needs in relationship you can enjoy a person for the qualities they have, rather than focusing on the aspects they lack. When you allow a relationship to be what it is, you free it to fulfil it’s highest purpose in your life. And when you allow your lover to be just exactly who they are, you can go on enjoying what it was that attracted you to them in the first place!

It’s a perfect system really :)

Letting go of 'rights'

Many people believe that human 'rights' are something we are born with. But have you ever stopped to think that maybe 'rights' is just another concept someone made up?

Years ago at university I took a course in Chinese history and philosophy. One of the things that stuck with me was an article that compared eastern and western views of rights and responsibility. In the west, the idea of individual rights is sacred; we believe that everyone is equal and we should all have access to certain things that are considered necessary to our well-being.

However in the east they look at things differently. Instead of seeing things in terms of rights they instead focus on responsibility. From this perspective, when each person fulfills their responsibility to others everyone's needs are met. The Chinese philosopher Confucius established the basis for this worldview. Even today if you ask a modern Asian young person about their ambitions many will talk about getting a job that will allow them to support their family, while in the west many young people are more interested in their own individual success.

Now I'm not saying that one or the other of these views is the right one. But I am suggesting that just like so many of the things we hold onto, the concept of rights is just that: a concept. More than this I'd like to suggest that this concept of individual rights may actually hold us back from being free and prevent us from evolving as a culture.

Take for example a woman who deeply desires to have a child but because she does not have a partner, or is not in a stable financial situation, this option is not available to her. In this instance her belief in her 'right' to have a child might cause her to see herself as a victim, to feel that in some way she has been cheated by life. This view of herself can only lead to unhappiness.

And while we all go around demanding our 'rights' we forget that as a human species we are actually denying these rights to the majority of people. In fact, your 'right' to own an iPhone or to have four children may be denying others access to more basic necessities such as clean water or food. Not to mention the needs of other species on our planet.

Human rights and social justice are often considered to be synonymous, but perhaps it is this very idea of 'rights' that gets in the way of developing a truly socially just society. Perhaps this separation of ourselves into individual units is promoting a competitive, grasping culture that divides the world into winners and losers.

Instead, we could see through this illusion of separation and understand the world and ourselves as they really are: a interdependent whole in which every element is indivisible from the rest. From this perspective it might be possible to create a culture where the needs of all beings are met, for as Joanna Macy points out in her beautiful book World as Lover, World as Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal, ‘to truly perceive all life as interconnected challenges many of our most automatic assumptions about what we are and what we need’ (Macy 2007).

What are your thoughts on this?