To-Do List: Triage

Hi there folks,If you’ve ever driven through the area around Scranton, PA, you’ve probably seen signs emblazoned with “Lackawanna”—announcing that you’re entering Lackawanna County or approaching Lackawanna State Park. (Obligatory history lesson/bummer: Like so many places in this country, that region was named by indigenous people shortly before encroaching European immigrants kicked them off of their own land. Even if I'm discussing something for entirely silly reasons, I like to do my research.)Depressing backstory aside, I am a lover of puns. And after encountering “Lackawanna” on multiple road trips, it lodged itself in our household’s lexicon as a way of describing failures of personal motivation. Don’t want to do something? Probably it’s because your wanna supplies are running low. “I need to reply to that email but I lack the wannas.” “I am entirely out of wannas today.”In entirely related news, my wannas have been near depletion for at the past month or so. Some of it is the comedown from my annual early-summer travel binge, some of it is burnout from a particularly busy period at work, and some of it, probably, is just the listless energy of summer—I’m convinced that our seasonal body clocks are honed during childhood, which manifests in adults as a strong resistance to productivity from June through August.Somehow, though, this year feels different than the usual cyclical yearning to eschew responsibility and bask in the sunshine. Could it be the endless stream of unprecedentedly distressing news, which is then immediately and inevitably eclipsed by the next new worrying thing? Or the whiplash between periods of blissful relaxation and the jarring reacclimation to basic current-events awareness (whether you were offline for a day, a week, or just an hour)? I’m gonna go ahead and say…maybe! Caring is exhausting, indifference is seductive but morally fraught and ultimately unsustainable, and in the meantime it’s hot. Except I can’t even complain about something as cliché-mundane as the weather without spinning my brain into worries about climate change.I am all in favor of mustering one’s wannas when possible and applying them to meaningful tasks—whether social (donating, protesting, voting, calling elected officials, campaigning, volunteering, etc.), or personal (career development, creative projects, household upkeep, and the like). But they’re not in infinite supply, and you need to keep a strategic reserve handy for unexpected crises, whether local or geopolitical. The only way to keep things in balance is to turn down opportunities to expend your precious energy—at least occasionally. While apathy is a poison, in controlled dosages it can be a cure, an inoculation against utter exhaustion.There’s nothing like the relief of considering an item on your to-do list and then deciding: “no.” (Or at least: “not today.”) It’s empowering, and immediately stress-reducing. Not every obligation can be deferred or disregarded—but that’s precisely why you have to take advantage of the ones that are. It’s easy to give outsized importance to things that aren’t actually time-sensitive. Once you’ve decided that a task Must Be Done, it’s hard to reclassify it, and that leaves you with a heap of dubiously necessary gottas that outstrips your stockpile of accumulated wannas. Something has to give, and ideally it shouldn’t be your own sanity.I’ve said versions of this before. But most recently, it came up when I recorded an episode of the Dear Prudence podcast—a glorious reunion with Toast cofounder Daniel Mallory Ortberg that was SO much fun. Toward the end of the full version (available through a Slate Plus subscription or trial, and worth listening to for the final letter alone), you’ll hear Danny ask me, essentially, “if you could give people one piece of advice, what would it be?” In a perfect world I’d have some kind of elevator speech prepared for precisely this question, but I did not. Instead I ended up delivering an off-the-cuff manifesto against overworking yourself out of a misplaced sense of duty. Sometimes being put on the spot gives you a chance to discover what’s most important to you.Speaking of The Toast, it’s finally back online, including all my old column archives! So that’s exciting. I have another column on The Billfold too, “On Emotional Labor and Regular Labor” (I really like that headline, and it came from the letter-writer so I can glow about it with impunity). Continuing this loose theme of “stop overburdening yourself,” it’s about those tricky situations where you need to say “no” to something you’re being asked to do—after you’ve already started doing it. When there’s an emotional component involved, it can be a real challenge to gracefully extricate yourself.It can be a challenge to gracefully extricate yourself from a tinyletter in progress too, but my non-computer life is calling and I must go. Be kind to yourself, friends, and take all the breaks your schedule will allow. ~court, AKA Businesslady PHOTO TIME! I usually call on my iPhone pics for this feature (which is an entirely too-generous term), but right now all I’ve got are weird personal-reference images and Voltron screenshots. I had to bust out my Real Camera™ to find something worth sharing—and for no particular reason, I’ve settled on this chipmunk Doug & I ran into on a hike back in May. 

It was keeping watch for its buddy, hidden in some leaves, and kept squeaking out what I can only assume was a warning—“watch out, those humans are still here.” During this stressful, insufficiently relaxing summer, it’s comforting to be reminded that kindness and consideration can still exist, in woodland creatures in human beings alike.