"How we spend our days," by Annie Dillard

What follows below is an excerpt from Dillard’s classic, The Writing Life, laid out as a poem for your reading pleasure.

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