Choosing the Poetic Life

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Is your Someday~Maybe list up to date?

That’s the list of all the projects you want to do ‘someday’ and those that you will  ‘maybe’ do one day.

Unconditional support. Acrylic and oil pastel on paper, Lynne Cameron 2020

The title of the list comes from David Allen, in his book Getting things Done. That book offers a great scheme for organizing busy lives in a way that really does help get things done, and employs many lists to do so. I use parts of the book in the Catching the Whispers course, which will be opening soon for a new run, to help make more time for the poetic life.

There we are concerned with sorting the more mundane aspects of life, like the day job and the admin that keeps a household running. The Someday~Maybe list is just as essential and much more fun.

Someday~Maybe projects are those that have been in the back of your mind for a long long time: taking up the piano again, buying a kayak, joining an expedition to the Antarctic, planting a forest, learning ballet as an adult or winetasting, volunteering in South America, writing a novel, publishing those poems,

And I have to say that the Covid-time version of this list is very easy to begin. After a longer than expected period in New Zealand, I can’t wait to spend time with family, to fly to Berlin and Rome and Paris again and just wander the cityscape, to hear live jazz, and… 

Once those missed treats are written down though, I wonder what will come next on your list?

Maybe there are some things that are still actually possible to do … some day soon I may really get a puppy or plant roses

Maybe there will be things that would not have been on the list you would have written a year ago because your values have shifted with the times …

It might be worth 15 minutes of your time soon to dream your Someday~Maybe list into existence.

Keep it somewhere safe – you never know!

 

someday~maybe…