There are two questions you can ask yourself at the start of a year, or a season, or a Monday morning. The first is: what should I do today? The second is: what am I becoming?
The first question is operational. It produces lists. The second is structural. It produces, if you let it, a slow rearrangement of the things that were already on the list.
Lists do not change you#
A list is a useful artifact. It is a snapshot of a moment’s intentions, pinned to a refrigerator or a notebook page or a sticky note on a monitor. But a list does not, in itself, change the person making the list. The same person who wrote “exercise three times this week” on Sunday night writes it again on the next Sunday night, and the Sunday after that.
If anything, the list becomes the substitute for the becoming. The writing of the list is the work. The list is the achievement. The not-doing of the things on the list is then somebody else’s fault — the calendar’s, the weather’s, the kids’, the boss’s.
Becoming is structural#
To ask what am I becoming is to step back one frame. It is to notice the shape of the days, the shape of the months, the gravity that pulls a person toward whatever it is they are slowly turning into.
If the gravity is wrong, no list will fix it. If the gravity is right, the list mostly writes itself.
The question is not what we want to do. The question is what we are willing to repeat.
— a note in the back of a notebook
So this is the threshold question. Not at the threshold of a new year, but at the threshold of any day on which the old answers stopped working. What am I becoming? And — the harder follow-up — is that what I want?