Getting Things Done

David Allen has been getting a lot of press, including a recent piece in Wired magazine, for the productivity tips he offers in the book Getting Things Done.

I think GTD has improved my sense of control over life in the two and a half years since I implemented a “trusted system.” But as huge a change as it has created in how I deal with my “stuff,” the most interesting thing I’ve read by Allen isn’t in the book. It’s part of his company’s principles and it’s this:

“Silence means we’re OK with what’s going on.”

Each Peach Pear Plum

This journal is about writing that informs and inspires me. It might be an inviting story or a cogent argument. It’s not usually a kid’s book.

I’m currently reading a children’s book that is a notable exception. I say “reading” not because it’s so long that I can’t get through it in one sitting, but because I’m reading it about once a day.

I’ve read most of the books in our daughter’s library tens of times. Only a few interest me after the first. But I’m probably on the one hundred and eleventh reading of Each Peach Pear Plum. It hasn’t always been in heavy rotation as it is now, but it was one of her first books, and years before she was born I read it frequently to another child.

The text is simple. The plot is minimal. The characters are undeveloped. So why do I still like this book? I’ll admit it: it’s the pictures.

The book’s first illustration is a landscape — a few hills, two houses, a stream, a wheat field, an orchard. Every subsequent page is illustrated. On one leaf is a vignette, on the other, a scene. The scene is from a perspective within that first landscape. The landscape maps the world of the story, and the scene is a pinpoint on the map.

The illustrator gets the perspective just right. What you see from every window or hilltop or bridge is what you would expect to see based on the relationship of locations in the landscape.

My daughter is interested in the book’s rhyme and rhythm, and in the repetition of its reading. I’m fascinated by a setting so carefully crafted that it could be a real place.

photo: Amy Smith

Hold On to Your Kids

In Hold On to Your Kids, Gordon Neufeld describes attachment villages as places where children are attached to their parents and through that attachment, connected to other adults; where values are passed from adults to children; where extended families live nearby and children are part of community where all generations participate in cultural activities. Since attachment villages generally no longer exist naturally, he suggests that we need to consciously re-create them, so that our children grow up surrounded by caring adults. I’ve given some thought to what this means for my family.One thing it has meant is that I have begun scheduling regular time for my daughter and me to spend with friends. I have chosen people to see regularly who have similar parenting values as I do, who care about my daughter, whose children I care about, and who I want to be close with. I’m considering how and whether to expand this effort. As much as I want many strong connections for my daughter and value the friendships for myself, I want to preserve some unstructured time in our lives.

I’ve discussed with other families how we might build connections as whole families, including members who are working during the day. This is something I struggle with, as I don’t know how to balance getting enough time with my own family and having time with others. We’re protective of the time we have as a family, since there’s relatively little of it. We see some friends socially, but not often enough or consciously enough to build those connections.

Another piece of village building for me has been strengthening ties with extended family. I have some family that I value greatly, but who live quite far. As a result, I used to visit them only every few years. When my daughter was born, I started traveling with her to see them each year for a couple of weeks. I also have put a great deal of thought and energy into how to improve my own attachments to my parents and parents-in-law to support the attachment that my daughter has to them.

photo: Amy Smith

Finally, I’ve been thinking about the people who are less immediately part of our lives, but nevertheless part of our community. This part is sometimes challenging to me, since I am socially reserved. We’ve recently moved, and I’ve decided that I want to know the families we live near. We introduce ourselves to people at the park and on walks. I’m connecting to more Queen Anne moms through a neighborhood email group. Meg and I shop at the farmers’ market each week, and I’ve been making the effort to learn the names of people we regularly buy our food from, and learn more about them and their farms. I’ve worked directly with a farm to create a community supported agriculture program for buying our meat, and we’ve connected with that farming family. We buy from small businesses on Queen Anne and introduce ourselves and talk to the owners.

So, that’s what works for us, and a little of what doesn’t. I’d be interested in learning what works for other families.

The Unsettling of America

I am motivated to create this journal as a means of capturing ideas and making connections between them. Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture is an apt starting place because it thoughtfully addresses many things I care about and coherently relates them. I begin with the hope that I can do the same.

Near the end of The Unsettling of America, Berry writes that “it is the overwhelming tendency of our time to assume that a big problem calls for a big solution. I do not believe in the efficacy of big solutions.” He follows this statement with a list of a dozen proposals for solving the big problem of industrial agriculture that he has described throughout the book as being both evidence and cause of disease in ourselves, our communities, and the world. Each of his proposals is ambitious, though arguably “small”. Taken together, they manifest his confidence in a much larger vision of a fundamental shift in our culture such that it would rest on the existence and health of a nation of small family farms.

Berry stands with Jefferson in his belief that “as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state”. I have a fantasy of living on a couple of acres with chickens, goats, bees, and vegetables, so there is much of his vision that’s appealing to me. Still, it wouldn’t work for my family to leave this city and move to the countryside. I have ties to the place I live, as I think most people do. Even if we could un-tether ourselves from our urban lives, where would we go that would allow us the connection to our families’ history, tradition, and heritage that Berry suggests is attendant with a connection to the land? Within my family, that cultural inheritance was disrupted at least a generation ago. With our link to the knowledge of country life broken, and new connections to city life forged, a mass migration from city to countryside significant enough to create the rural-based society Berry advocates seems unlikely.

If we can’t return ourselves and our nation to our agrarian roots, what can we do to heal the cultural wounds he describes – wounds that are as much ecological, communal, and personal as they are agricultural? As I read The Unsettling of America, my own answer came in the form of a question: “What are you doing now?”

The question originated in my reading of Joel Salatin’s You Can Farm. Salatin writes that he is often asked for advice on how to get started farming, and he always responds, “What are you doing now?” He suggests that regardless of your location or other limitations, there are many ways to make farming part of your life.

Though, like the question, this “answer” relates to farming, for me its scope is much broader. “What are you doing now?” is a prompt to identify what I can do in this moment, in this place – to sustain myself, my family, my community, and my world.

This is a profound shift in focus for me, because for my entire adult life I have been looking forward to a future in which I will be doing useful and meaningful work. Only upon becoming a mother did I feel the value of the work I was already doing. As I ponder my growing desire for work in addition to mothering a toddler, I am still looking to the future and what I might become with more education or more time or more something, but I am also able to envision what I can do with what I already have.

So here are a few of the things that I can do, and am doing now. I write, and I feel a sense of pride and satisfaction in that. I create an “attachment village” – a concept from Dr. Gordon Neufeld’s Hold on to Your Kids (more on that later). I get to know my neighbors. I feed my family from local produce, and I know the people who raise it.

These actions help me love where I live and bring more of what I want here, in the words of a friend. They are expressions of and contributions to a meaningful life.