Annie Dillard on How We Spend Our Lives & Presence Over Productivity

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.

A schedule defends from chaos and whim.

It is a net for catching days.

It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being;

it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time;

it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself,

decades later, still living.

Each day is the same,

so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.

~ Annie Dillard, The Writing Life