My Humility List

A book I enjoy leafing through now and then is titled, “List Your Self, Listmaking as the Way to Self-Discovery” by Ilene Segalove and Paul Bob Velick. It is three hundred pages of lines with the list title at the top of each page. The book touts itself as “A provocative, probing and personal expedition into your mind, heart, and soul.” That, of course, is only true if the reader (lister) probs provocatively and personally into their mind, heart and soul to create the various lists suggested. For me it is a very enjoyable exercise in personal reflection. I had fun with the, “List all the things you’ve made or built by hand.” The “List all the things you’d like to say to your mother,” was good therapy. I add to that list almost every time I pick up the book. I plan to think for a while before writing the, “List all the places you’ve been that made you feel immortal, moved to tears, or omnipotent.” The last grouping of lists in the book is called, “Suddenly.” I haven’t made any of these yet. One is called, “Suddenly you can talk to animals. List the ones you want to converse with and why.” I have a very large plecostomus. I would love to know what is on his or her mind.

If it is in the book, I haven’t found it, but, It would be interesting to make a daily list of my personal acts of humility. Today’s list would be blank. Can we claim humility if we can’t point to an act of humility? This may be similar to what The Book of James says about faith and works. “Show me your faith without the works, and I will show you my faith by my works.” (James 2:18) If we can’t identify an act of humility in our day’s activity, how can we consider ourselves humble? I actually planned to do something really humble today for my Humility List. The positive thing about that is I found myself searching for an opportunity to exhibit humility. That is good. The unfortunate thing about that is I didn’t accomplish a single humble act. Wait! That sounded pretty humble, didn’t it? I could put on my Humility List: I humbly admitted to a lack of humility. Maybe, with a daily admission to a lack of humility, I could learn how to be more humble. A list could help. A conscious effort to perform an act of humility, in order to have something to add to a Humility List, could encourage more Humilous behavior, thereby showing my humility by my works. Maybe I should change the list name from Humility List to “How am I Humble?, Let Me Count The Ways.”