Missing the POINT

My to-do list is get­ting out of hand. I’ve had the same one for years, and it’s now so long I have to pro­gramme time into my day just to get through it. Some­times I see items on that list that have been there so long (fix garage tap, make copy of patio key, email aunt Elsie…) that it seems as if I in­her­ited it, and will pass it on to my kids when the Lord fi­nally calls me to his side.

And yet, as with most peo­ple, my days are full, from early morn­ing until I col­lapse into bed at night. Ob­vi­ously, a lot of time is spent work­ing, sleep­ing, eat­ing, on the toi­let (more and more these days), walk­ing the dog, cook­ing, and so on, but never a day goes by when I don’t have to ring the in­sur­ance com­pany, or go to the doc­tor, or visit the bank, or take the car for its ser­vice, or book flights, or pick up the kids, and a long etcetera.

Part of the rea­son why I never get round to deal­ing with many of the items on my to-do list — that darn garage tap! — is down to time man­age­ment. I’m not a lazy per­son, and I like to at least try and keep on top of things, if for no other rea­son than to avoid being swamped. Yet, I feel that even if I man­aged to hone my abil­ity to or­gan­ise my time with laser-like ac­cu­racy, tak­ing ad­van­tage of every sin­gle mo­ment of the day and ap­por­tion­ing re­sources with pre­ci­sion ef­fi­ciency, that my list would still be just as long as it is.

The is­sues we have to deal with every day are just about in­ex­haustible, but our time and re­sources are fi­nite. That means the dif­fer­ence be­tween whether some­thing ac­tu­ally gets done or not is down to pri­ori­tis­ing. The house­hold runs fairly smoothly but that is down to the press­ing mat­ter of putting petrol in the car rather than fix­ing the garage tap, which I’ll do “to­mor­row”.

So far, so ob­vi­ous, and I imag­ine just about every­one dances to the same tune — is there an­other way of doing it? And yet, coun­tries don’t seem to fol­low the same rules. Take the refugee cri­sis, for ex­am­ple (see pages 22 & 23). All Au­gust, the Open Arms res­cue ship was de­nied any­where to dock, de­spite being full of trau­ma­tised refugees. The story went on for weeks, with the Mediter­ranean coun­tries deny­ing re­spon­si­bil­ity and the EU sit­ting on its hands. Fi­nally, even Richard Gere had to get in­volved, and the ship was fi­nally al­lowed to dis­em­bark its human cargo in Lampe­dusa. The Open Arms saga is just one of many sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tions that to­gether make up one of the most im­por­tant crises fac­ing Eu­rope, and yet no one is pri­ori­tis­ing it and it re­mains at the bot­tom of the to-do list.

This seems to be true of just about all the most im­por­tant is­sues fac­ing us today. Ex­perts warn that we have about three weeks until we sink below the waves and yet it’s hardly a pri­or­ity. We could end most road deaths to­mor­row if we lim­ited the ca­pac­ity of car en­gines. Poverty could be wiped out in short order if we got rid of nu­clear weapons and used the money to cre­ate jobs. Why doesn’t every roof in Cat­alo­nia have a solar panel? How many old ladies will die of cold this win­ter for a lack of heat­ing? And so on.

Now we are in Sep­tem­ber ,the news cycle is grind­ing back into ac­tion, and we can look for­ward to head­lines about the most im­por­tant is­sues of the day. How­ever, you just know that the is­sues that will be given most pri­or­ity will be the equiv­a­lent of the garage tap while the mort­gage is un­paid, the Earth burns and old ladies start drop­ping like flies.