List-Making
On New Year’s Eve I was at home, hard at work. One thing remained on my to-do list for 2025: Revamping my childhood scrapbook. I am not exactly sure when my mother began creating scrapbooks for me and my three siblings (four children born within a 4 ½-year span), but somehow an elementary school teacher found the time to chronologically chart her four children’s lives through memorabilia displayed in 11 x 14 albums.
By the time I was in junior high, Mom had affixed birthday invitations, ticket stubs, report cards, class photos, newspaper clippings, and certificates to every blank page in my scrapbook. From that point forward, she tucked additional memorabilia between the final page and the back cover.
Whenever I have pulled my scrapbook off the shelf in recent years to jog my memory about a particular detail from childhood, mementos have fluttered to the ground. After all these years, the glue, tape, and adhesive photo corners had lost their grip. Each time this happened, I vowed to undertake a restoration project. Last fall, my good intentions were finally transformed into creative action.
With two hours to spare before the new year’s arrival, I affixed a copy of my transcript from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville on page 96 of my new scrapbook. I was awash in satisfaction. Few things make me happier than being able to cross something off my to-do list.
My fascination with lists originated with a Christmas gift I received from my parents when I was 13: The Book of Lists by David Wallechinsky, Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace. This is not the kind of book you devour from cover to cover; this is a book suitable for nibbling. The lists were organized by chapters, with some having more appeal than others to a teenage girl. For instance, I had little interest in “Crime and Punishment” and “War and Other Disasters” but was drawn to “America the Beautiful” and “What’s in a Name?”
The first list I recall creating was a record of states my family had visited. My parents firmly believed that travel was an integral part of our education, so two-week cross-country road trips were the focal points of our summers. By the time I began college, I had visited 46 states. When Paul and I began making summer road trips with our son, we began our own log. In the summer of 2001, we added the fiftieth state to our family’s checklist: Alaska.
Our family’s travels spurred us to create other lists of places we had visited, including national parks, minor league ballparks, and major league ballparks. In 2012, I began keeping a list of books I read throughout the year, a practice that continues to this day. After we relocated to North Carolina in 2022, I added the names of local establishments where I dined to my newly created roster of restaurants in Western North Carolina. Of course, to-do lists remain a fixture of my day-to-day existence.
When I first learned about Suleika Jaouad’s annual ritual of creating five lists to mark the beginning of a new year, I knew I had stumbled upon a helpful spiritual practice. Like many of us, Jaouad dislikes making new year’s resolutions because the effort often results in discouragement before January draws to a close. In contrast, “The Five Lists” journaling practice provides a path for reflecting on the previous year, assessing the present, and dreaming about the future.
Since we are not yet halfway through January, this is still a prime time to experiment with Jaouad’s list-making practice. Here are her journaling prompts:
1. What in the last year are you proud of?
2. What did this year leave you yearning for?
3. What’s causing you anxiety?
4. What resources, skills, and practices can you rely on in the coming year?
5. What are your wildest, most harebrained ideas and dreams?
As I worked through my five lists on New Year’s Day, I realized that one of the dreams I recorded last January in my fifth list was now something I counted as a source of pride in my first list. Noting that shift from dream to reality resulted in a surge of joy accompanied by an awareness of the momentum I was carrying into the new year.
Are you ready to make your lists?
