Every day a slew of possible tasks hatch in my mind, like dozens of baby spiders emerging from an egg sack. They start to crawl everywhere in my consciousness. I want to wrangle them onto a list—a clean, easy to follow sequential series of tasks to complete systematically and restore my life to calm, but there are too many.

It seems like a problem of time. I think that I can just fill 8 (or 10, or 12) hours accomplishing tasks. But when the day is done, so much seems left undone. The pattern repeats the next day.

At the end of the week the spiders have set up shop. They have spun cobwebs of anxiety. It just doesn’t work.