Quote This: Annie Dillard on how we spend our days

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, in The Writing Life
via brainpickings.org

You know I don’t want to tell you or anyone what you *should* do, so I won’t tell you that you should read Maria Popova‘s Brain Pickings religiously. But I will tell you this: if you love words, literature, reflection… your life will be all the fuller for an occasional visit to BrainPickings.

Photo: Some of the mud-splattered beautiful people who helped save my community. Who abandoned schedules for days, weeks, to do what needed to be done… (What are you talking about? unLessons from the Flood: We are amazing.)