Tag: procrastination

Procrastination? Maybe later.

There was a time in my life when I never put off until tomorrow what I could do today. In fact, it drove me a bit nuts to put off until tomorrow. Perhaps that is why I found myself so productive, completing projects, working full-time at my day job, writing at night, crafting and keeping up with the house and garden. Whew. Makes me tired just reading that sentence.

Then things happened. First, there was an accident that required two surgeries to my arm. Plans changed. I couldn’t do everything I wanted to with one arm, although I tried. Believe me, I tried. Still, I was forced to prioritize. When my garden went to heck in a hand basket, I had to suck it up. Not that I did. I railed against the state of it constantly in my head and occasionally out of it, but really, I did have to suck it up, tell myself that later I would get to it. The same went for my crafting. Painting pictures was, well, out of the picture. I continued to work with one hand and taught myself to physically write with the left during this time, but then, my day job wasn’t something I could put off. It had to be done. Putting off the rest was the first step toward being a procrastinator.

Wasn’t it?

Then the second, and worse, thing happened a couple years later. Injured in a motor vehicle accident, my brain stopped functioning the way had I gotten used to it behaving for all the years my brain and I have been acquainted. This went way beyond my previous temporary physical disability. My brain was letting me down left and right and in the beginning I couldn’t even get angry about it, because I couldn’t hold a cognitive thought long enough to maintain that emotion. I was scared though. Plenty scared. That popped up quite frequently.

Three years have passed since that awful day, and I am doing much better. Still not where I was, and perhaps I never will be again, but definitely better. And yet, I’m still a procrastinator. What happened to that “do it now or kick yourself in the ass for not” attitude? I’m thinking maybe priorities have now changed to the point where I can’t get them back. That makes sense, I suppose. Or maybe I need to write down my plans for the day on a note (which I had to do in detail for quite a while—did I abandon that practice too soon?) so I can check off each thing as I do it, reminders staring me in the face.

Or maybe I’m just tired.

Take my blogging for instance. I made a non-New Year’s resolution to keep up with it, to at least complete that short form of writing twice weekly. I do so love to write (I’ve even gotten back to long form writing, but not the huge chunks I used to do while working full-time, taking care of the house and garden, crafting, painting, etc., that I managed before—I mean, I finished three novels in an eight-month period for Kensington while working full-time, taking care of the house and garden, and, yeah, all the rest). I actually blogged about my blogging plans not much more than a month ago and yet here I am, having gone a week and a half without so much as a peep. The ideas are there, the will is there, but there’s a disconnect these days between thinking about something and following through with action.

Put it off, my dear, put it off, get to it later.

Is that actually what I’m doing? I don’t know. I’ll figure it out tomorrow.

Life’s Little Surprises

Somehow, in the craziness of trying to accomplish all I’ve set myself this summer, I had forgotten my little pond out front. Not that I’d actually forgotten it’s existence. Fixing or removing the waterfall and making changes to the layout of this small body of water is on my to-do list. I’ve underlined that chore multiple times. Perhaps even hard enough to push the pen point through the paper.

Still, I can’t remember the last time I looked at the pond except in disgust (awful, that–after all, the state of neglect is not the pond’s fault). All the same, nearly every day I find myself hearkening with a smile to the bullfrog’s deep callings accompanied by various little peeps in its vicinity while I’m engaged on the small hill’s upper side–either weeding, planting, planning or occasionally relaxing on the porch.

I took the embarrassingly short walk down there today to check things out and found to my utter delight the water lilies are in bloom. What a wonderful, inspiring surprise. I promptly decided to push caring for the water feature to the top of my to-do list. It does, however, seem to be getting along quite nicely without me, having formed it’s own flourishing little eco-system with no help at all from moi.

I am put in mind of Jeff Goldblum’s character’s utterance in the first Jurassic Park movie. “Life finds a way…”