The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

How We Spend Our Days Is How We Spend Our Lives: Annie Dillard on Presence Over Productivity

by Maria Popova

From The Writing Life (public library) by Annie Dillard — a wonderful addition to the collected wisdom of beloved writers — comes this beautiful and poignant meditation on the life well lived, reminding us of the tradeoffs between presence and productivity that we’re constantly choosing to make, or not:

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.

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/07/annie-dillard-the-writing-life-1/

Fleet Library at RISD / Providence Athenaeum - http://librarycat.risd.edu/record=b1073056~S4
Ocean State Libraries - https://catalog.oslri.net/record=b1129035~S1
WorldCat - http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/19268199
goodreads - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/529238.The_Writing_Life
LibraryThing - http://www.librarything.com/work/23460