I made a list once.
Not formally. Not a document I saved anywhere. A running mental list, the kind that accretes over years, the kind that you add to when you see something and think: when I have time I will do that, when I have time I will learn that, when I have time I will go there and read that and call that person and finally take that course and figure out what that bird is called and whether I still remember enough French to have a conversation. The list grew for decades, patient and unaccused, waiting for the time I kept promising it.
I have the time now.
And the list is doing something I did not anticipate. It is losing items. Not because I am doing them, though I am doing some of them, but because I am looking at them with the eyes of a woman who now has the time and discovering that some of what I thought I wanted was what I told myself I wanted in lieu of the things I actually wanted and could not admit to wanting because the actual things were harder to justify in a life that required justification for every hour spent.
The pottery class: yes. That one was real.
The language app I downloaded and opened twice: also real, still wanting, still there.
The whole project of becoming more organized: no. That one was anxiety wearing the costume of self-improvement. I am releasing it with something that feels like relief.
What I am finding, underneath the list, is smaller and more specific than I expected. I want to walk more. I want to read more slowly, the way you read when you are not reading to get through something but to be inside it. I want to cook a meal with no deadline attached to its completion. I want to sit with my mother on a Tuesday afternoon with nowhere to be and no clock running and let the afternoon be what it is.
Most of what I actually wanted, it turns out, was time that belonged to me.
I had the things confused with the time. The things were just the shapes I imagined the time taking. What I wanted was the time itself. And now I have it and it turns out to be both simpler and more enormous than anything on the list.
