The calm, organised lives of list makers sound lovely, but I cannot keep a list

You may or may not know that, for the past 18 months, The Irish Times writer and author Patrick Freyne has been my writing mentor. Over the course of this mentorship, Patrick has given me a lot of advice. A lot of this advice has been: “You should keep a list.”

Patrick likes to keep lists. He has shown me his lists. It surprises me that someone with such plentiful facial hair keeps lists as tidy as he, but Patrick’s lists are very tidy.

Patrick has bountiful diaries abundant with lists. He even wrote an essay about lists recently for Tolka Journal. The essay is brimful of lists.

When I complain to Patrick that I am short on inspiration, Patrick will advise me to write a list of my ideas. When I complain that my ideas do not grow beyond the first typed line on a page, Patrick will repeat his refrain: “Write a list.”

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Gerard Howlin: We now know which hospitals are overspending and which are delivering. Let’s fund them accordingly

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I nod wisely at this sage advice and continue to hope that inspiration will strike at the right time.

Many people find lists help them to remember important things: their creative ideas, their daily tasks, the food they need to buy in the supermarket and the commitments they have made to colleagues and friends. It is a method of outsourcing memory and helps people feel more organised. Being organised, it seems, makes people feel calm. Lists take the knotted squiggles tangling in your brain and neatly arrange them on a page in a clear and ordered manner.

It sounds lovely, I admit it. But I cannot keep a list.

Lists make me feel claustrophobic. I like to think that each moment has potential. That at any minute something unexpected and wonderful can happen. Perhaps, one Tuesday, instead of shuffling between my turmeric-stained kitchen table and sagging green couch, I might be proposed to by the barista in my local coffee shop. I could be whisked to Brazil to dance the Forró on a beach. What then if next on my to-do list reads, “Buy eco detergent and sponge x2″?

When the opportunity strikes, I do not want to be beholden to a list.

You may assume, as someone who does not keep lists, that I must have a superior memory. That I have a super-organised brain. In fact, I am just terribly inefficient. I watch my best ideas drift away from me like a log floating upstream; slow enough that I may catch them, but it would necessitate an amount of organisation to haul it back to the bank.

I often find myself in the shop wondering why it is I went there in the first place, and while a list may prove effective in prompting my memory, I argue (or at least attempt to convince myself) that having no list allows the opportunity to buy things I do not need and provides the challenge of creating a dish out of capers, fancy oat yoghurt and anchovy paste which, of course, I love!

I once read in an interview with a famous writer – I don’t recall who it was, or where I read it, though I might, had I written it down – that he doesn’t – at least I think it was a he – write down any of his ideas. If they are good enough, they will return to him.

This, I cried, is creative instinct, not disorganisation!

(I am still waiting for a sparkling essay idea I had last November to return to me. By his logic, maybe it wasn’t so sparking.)

There’s perhaps another reason I don’t like lists. When you have chronic illness, many items on your list remain unticked. Great ideas that I never had the energy to explore. Tasks I was too unwell to complete. Events I could not attend due to migraine. It would hurt to see reflected back to me unequivocally the great (and small) plans I once had that were never, could never, become realised.

A list of failed plans, unachieved dreams, lost potential.

Living with illness means living with a constant unknowing. It involves relinquishing control. You must be flexible, knowing that each day may not follow the course you desire. A functional to-do list would be full of clauses and sub-clauses, asterisks and caveats. Frankly, it is easier to just go with it. To watch how the day unfolds and embrace what tasks I can do.

Perhaps, you could argue, I could write a list of my achievements, a list of what makes me happy, who I love, my favourite dancing partner. And maybe in some sense, I do do this. It’s just not a “list”. I don’t “write” it. These thoughts swill about my brain instead. Knocking out other unimportant thoughts, like what it is I need to do that day and where do I need to be.