Sometimes a distinction has been made between 'being' and 'doing'. In fact they are hard to separate as being affects doing and doing affects being. Yet I increasingly recognize that I should give more thought and attention to the 'being' side. Some weeks back Hollywood, along with film buffs world-wide, was celebrating the birth centenary of John Wayne – the straight-talking, straight-shooting star of True Grit and countless other Western movies. Reflecting on what made Wayne the enduring prototype of 'American Man', a New York columnist wrote the following. 'It was not only that he was tall, rugged, plain-speaking, confident and impatient. His real qualification is that he understood that life was one long to-do list. That's what American men do. They live and die figuring out ways to cross items off. It's their quintessential trait.'
Now I don't want to disparage to-do lists or belittle their usefulness. They have figured prominently in my own life. I wonder just how many things wouldn't have got done without them. My wife is fond of making little lists of things that need doing round the house and I must admit the sight of one of them is not always greeted with the outright enthusiasm it should evoke. She herself records coming across a to-do list belonging to someone she worked with in the office. There was some hilarity when she and a friend spotted that one early item (which had been duly ticked off) read, 'clean your shoes'! It's a bit like the lady who used to put 'Make a list' as her first task.
All too often I have to confess to discovering that my morning times of quiet, where I seek to be closer to God and find inspiration and leading for the day, have in fact spawned virtual to-do lists. They have been the poorer for it. There is perhaps a parallel here with the way people view the study of history. Some see it as a grand narrative culminating at where we are at present. Others see it as a fascinating and instructive drama of causes and consequences. But for some it is merely dates and chronology or, as one practitioner put it, 'just one damn thing after another'. Oxford historian AJP Taylor, whose lectures I used to attend, rebutted this approach. 'History,' he once said, 'is not just a catalogue of events put in the right order like a railway time table. It is a version of events.' At its best it is our story, gleaned from a rich inter-mingling and inter-reaction between people and ideas and social and economic factors. Just as history is more than 'one damn thing after another', so life is surely more than one long to-do list.
Playwright Alan Thornhill called his auto-biography, Best of Friends and gave it the sub-title, 'A life of enriching friendships'. My North Wales colleague Beryl Jones called her reminiscences, Cadwyn Cyfeillion – a chain (or necklace) of friends. These titles hint at an entirely different centre of gravity to life from one centred around getting through the to-do list. It constitutes a rich tapestry of relationships that needs constant care and nurturing. The tapestry includes immediate family, wider family, friends, work colleagues, neighbours and fellow members of club or place of worship. Some of these categories of course over-lap. There are people to care for and people who care for us. It has often been remarked upon how, at funeral services, the remembrances of the deceased that people give usually concentrate on the sort of person he or she was – on their qualities of personality and character – and rarely on what they did. Sometimes a distinction has been made between 'being' and 'doing'. In fact they are hard to separate as being affects doing and doing affects being. Yet I increasingly recognize that I should give more thought and attention to the 'being' side – exploring and deepening my relationship with God. Looking back, I think that the trouble is that I have usually ended up concentrating on the 'doing' and somehow hoped that the 'being' would look after itself.
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