This morning I woke up to my usual inertness, accompanied by low-grade depression (“low-grade” is how a therapist defined it long ago), which fades quickly once I get up on my feet and get going. But often, what hits me in those first moments is my to-do list.

I don’t need to look it up on my computer, I know many of them: change hummingbird food (which means washing the feeders), clean kitchen, send out links for meetings, write my usual 3 or 3-1/2 hours, sit, prepare for Friday’s class with latest cohort of the Zen Peacemaker Order, walk Aussie, concretize plans for weekend (meeting my niece in New York City), make up weekly shopping list, bring check for electricity bill for immigrant family, etc., etc. That doesn’t include actual or Zoom meetings, including a doctor’s appointment in the afternoon.

The contents of the list aren’t what matters, it’s the sheer volume of it. And even that matters far less than the old, old feeling of compulsion, living an obligatory life, the dead weight of I have to do this.

That’s followed by a series of internal recriminations: Why did I say yes to teaching another class? Why did I say yes to Saturday in the Big Apple when going down and coming back up will take many hours? Can’t Aussie do one day without a walk (“Don’t even consider it,” she growls in my mind. “Think of how guilty you’ll feel!”)? And the hell with the hummingbirds!

The only things I don’t question is daily meditation and writing, but that still leaves lots of space for self-indictment. Not a pleasant way to wake up and start the day, even as the blood starts coursing throughout my body and the energy returns.

What makes things worse is the nagging feeling that I’ll never accomplish all those to-dos, that some will simply move on to the next day, or they’ll appear the next month (monthly clean-up of coffee machine, clean up WordPress blog site every 5 weeks, etc.). Nothing will ever be finished; to-dos are perpetual.

But of course, they’re only as perpetual as my life, which ain’t perpetual in the least. Reflecting on that, I begin to look at my daily to-do list differently. Wow, I think, one day you won’t see hummingbirds—and you also won’t be emptying the feeders from ants, washing and refilling them. One day you’ll stop walking dogs.

“Whaddaya mean, you’ll stop walking dogs?”

“Aussie, I’m beginning to see my to-dos as beautiful teachings of impermanence. Just look at all the tasks I won’t have to do anymore. Sometimes they feel as if they’re engraved in stone, but now they don’t weigh me down so much. They feel more ephemeral, light as a feather, because they’ll pass, just like me. That’s what I call freedom!”

“Yes, but do you have to die for it?”

Buddhist teacher Joan Halifax says: “When I recognized that I already have what dying people have—mortality—I stopped being afraid of catching it.”

So many things that once weighed on me don’t anymore. I have way less ambition than I once had. It’s too late to be a great writer, never put in the necessary 10,000 hours. Nor a great teacher or activist. Won’t master the last movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight or make a good pie crust. If anything, my life has been a medley of things, not one of which took me all the way, so to speak.

The writer Peter Matthiessen once told me that one has to write a lot—8 hours a day everyday—to begin to write well. Almost never did that and certainly can’t now.

Cocktails are my drink of choice: a little of this with a little of that, topped with an olive, a slice of lemon, or a maraschino cherry. In a world divided into foxes and hedgehogs (the Greek poet Archilochus wrote that a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing, a famous matrix later adopted by philosopher Isaiah Berlin), I’m a fox for sure. No one dharma, no one great idea, but many little glimpses and discoveries, most of which don’t necessarily connect.

Driving to meet a friend for lunch at a local pizzeria, I passed a couple that lives three houses away from me. Stopped, rolled down the window to say hello and what’s new. Told them I’ll be down in New York City this weekend.

“We’re such house creatures,” they tell me. “We both like to stay home.”

“So do I,” I respond. “Every time I make a plan to go anywhere, I have second thoughts right away. But you know something? It’s too tempting to stay home. I need to get out of that cocoon and find some new stimuli. Without that, I’ll molder.” They nodded and I continued. “I guess we need some kind of balance between staying in, compact and comfortable, and going out into the world.”

“Yes,” the man said, “and you found that balance.”

I was confused. “What makes you say that?” We were wave-to-each-other neighbors, nothing more than that.

“Because you’re happy,” he said.

He’s right, I thought to myself as I drove off, I am happy. My life is a blend, an assortment of chocolates. I live in the land of to-dos, and also in the land of forest walks, of concentrated writing, of talks on Zoom and phone, of sutra study, raking leaves, and stopping everything to stroke Aussie, notice the white hairs around her mouth, and throw a stuffed orange crayfish for the smaller chihuahua.

The danger is overthinking it. The danger is getting overwhelmed by day-to-day content and forgetting the big context, and that is: I am happy.