Things Left Undone

Within each Anglican church service, these words are said in the Prayer of General Confession:

“…we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed; by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.”

My brain loves to focus on the second half of this prayer—the things left undone. It is a phrase that rings deep within me every Sunday when I kneel for confession.

Productivity has always been the way I’ve defined myself—ingrained in my head both by others from an early age and by my own choice. In my head, defining myself this way has long seemed noble enough for any given day—“I’m a city planner, a volunteer, a civil servant…”—and has felt responsible and fulfilling to a sense of duty as someone with a…what’s the word…voc…vocati…

But the world gets bigger as you grow older and time goes on. Tasks get more serious, most things now have real mental (and physical…) consequences, and your actions have people relying on them on a daily basis. The course of daily life is increasingly outside of your control. Productivity in this world hardly gets easier, let alone more straightforward. Relying on productivity as a measure of your worth and value in your world is hardly stable; the foundation of this idea about oneself is broken, crushed by idealism about yourself and crumbling under the weight of things far outside of your control. I often find myself falling under this collapse of a failing foundation for yourself.

Yet escaping a poor foundation for yourself feels silently impossible. They say that strength comes through continuous struggle, but fighting the misaligned version of yourself just feels like continuous struggle, and against an entity who wants to reverse every new direction back toward where you were. Every step forward feels bound to have a slip backwards, like hiking up a steep slope of wet rocks:

Rest has to be the place from which you organize your life. But maybe that’s just lazy, and just accepting the fact that you’re not doing as much as you should. Plus, look at all the other people not operating with rest—you know you can keep up with those people.

Your faith is already given to you, and you are already free without earning it. But what is faith without works? And life is something given to us too—what is the damage of wasting it when there’s so many problems to solve?

You are enough as you are. But what will I lose in the future if I don’t keep working?

You have come so far. But have you done well enough?

I am loved. But how long will people keep loving you when you keep screwing up and letting people down?

The result is bleak. Maybe it’s staying late at work to chase a feeling of accomplishment because so much of the day’s progress was spent on projects and accomplishments which require coordination and care between people, a reality which has a tendency to take most matters out of your own control. Maybe it’s nights spent in some sort of liminal purgatory between work and rest, trying to push myself to work yet stumbling forward with minimal progress. Maybe it’s the invention of projects and busyness for myself where such things were never expected in the first place.

The sum of all of this being a brain operating at a rolling boil, friction building between the work I am doing to fill my own tank and the reality that the tank is actually running dangerously low on fuel.

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Why is it so hard to leave value solely by what we accomplish?

Is it just because it’s easier? After all, it’s measurable and rational, and doesn’t require actual require substantial confidence or any sort of belief about yourself.

It is because of cheap dopamine highs? Few things feel better than climbing the mountaintop of something difficult and accomplishing something you set out to do—why not chase that more and more?

What if it’s something more substantial? If I stop defining myself by what I do, and pushing myself as hard as I can with this belief, will I actually affect the world in a positive or lasting way? Will the world become…small? It can almost feel weak to think otherwise in a world where even our closest friends are sitting with deep hurt and pain, let alone our neighbors and neighborhoods, street and cities of people around us on a daily basis. Can I actually let go?

—

Most of the time, this lust for productivity and need to define myself by it just leads to disappointment. Even the noblest accomplishments are hardly linear, and the lust of seeking that sense of accomplishment feeds like the most lurid of addictions, asking for more and more and giving less and less in return.

As the need to accomplish has grown alongside feelings of burnout, exhaustion and general frustration, a new promise to yourself can emerge which can feel noble but is filled with a perverse procrastination and a commitment to delay:

Tomorrow is the day I can start to accomplish these things—I may not have done it all today, but I can always start tomorrow, push myself tomorrow, make up for it tomorrow…tomorrow…tomorrow…

Recently, a friend and I were talking on the phone as I sat on my roof, both facing frustration about where we are and where we thought we should be. Trips we aren’t taking, career advancements we feel are passing us by, and skills we feel like we should know by now dominated the conversation. Our conversation boiled down to something sounding like, “what is actually stopping us—why don’t we just take the leap and do these things?” After all, we’re just making the promise to ourselves that keeps pushing them further out past tomorrow, feeding on the hope that we’ll eventually do those things, and time is quickly passing us by in life. We could certainly just choose to start them, and try to find peace in smaller accomplishments inside of that by just choosing to do something.

Yet I realize that I missed the point (and I apologize to my friend on the phone for the misstep—to be fair, it wasn’t my first and it won’t be my last). For accomplishments are things which are readily pushed around, pulling from a finite amount of energy and resources for which our control has but a fleeting grasp. Such things never change.

We might actually be pushing off something greater—something that can actually free us from the cycle of falling short of what we sought to achieve, and resolving to do more again. Something that turns off the burner boiling us and putting us under pressure to keep doing, melting us into an endless cycle of coming up short and pushing forward on an empty tank, all while we feel our own sense of our selves deteriorating.

And thus maybe I’m pushing off finding my home with the person I am and the person I’m becoming; in the worst interpretation of all of this, I’m putting off an answer to the question, “am I actually enough?” Pushing off some true realization that the person we choose to be—wrapped in the immediacy of how we respond to our live, day by day and minute by minute, is enough for each day.

I think this is actually the work I am pushing off. And I wonder if that’s true for most of us who are all too prone to define ourselves by our work and what we do for others and the world around us.

We’ve left ourselves the work to build a foundation that is firm and secure, to find a path to say, “we are actually enough.”

Father, forgive us for the things which we have left undone.