Sometimes we are blessed with
the gift of a new question.
–Richard Foster

In my new book Tough Transitions: Navigating Your Way Through Difficult Times, I talk about a variety of things we can as we dealing with the chaos of change that almost always accompanies transitions. Here is an excerpt from the book about the simple act of making lists.

The act of making a list is deceptively simple—after all, we’ve been making lists since we went to the store to get our school supplies. But List Making, in this time of Reviewing, can be something so much more than a mundane activity done to jog our minds. The ancient meaning of list came from the Old English word hylsnan which means to listen to. So when we make lists during Reviewing who are we listening to? We are listening to ourselves. We are eavesdropping on our own conversation. List Making works like dropping a bucket down into a deep well, a well of memory, desires, experiences. Lists we make reveal things to us, surprise us, remind us. When we make lists, we can explore the unexamined interior of ourselves and discover things about ourselves that we didn’t even know we didn’t know.

Once I was in a meeting where the leader asks us to list all the telephone numbers we knew from memory. Our home telephone number was the first I put on my list. Then my husband’s mobile, my office number, our fax number, my sister’s number in Tennessee, my aunt’s number in Georgia. First of all, I was surprised at how few numbers I knew. Then I realized that the one person in my immediate family whose number I did not have memorized was the number of my brother Frank. This amazed me, given that I have only 2 people in my family of origin who are still alive—my sister and my brother—and I didn’t know his number. Oh, we emailed almost every day and talked on the telephone occasionally. But what the list making revealed to me was that I don’t talk to my brother enough on the phone to have memorized his number. And I wanted to change that. So when I got home, I copied his number out of my data base and taped it under the telephone where it could stay until I had committed it to memory. This is the power of the simple act of List Making.

Ilene Segalove and Paul Bob Velick have written a very good book called List Your Self: Listmaking as the Way to Self-Discovery. Here are few lists they suggest that I think might be useful when we are experiencing Reviewing while navigating a tough transition:

List the things you think you can’t live without.

List all the prayers, sayings, and chants you’ve been taught that make you feel better.

Think of your own lists…a good/bad list about a time in the past; a list of those things in the past that you’d like to bring forth in the future in a new form; a list of things you assumed before this tough transition happened. Make these lists and see what you discover.

Let me know if you decide to make some lists this month. I’d love to hear what you discover.

Have a great May!