Practicing Life #11: Procrastination by Any Other Name Would Waste as Much Time
Meditation:
This one is going to be a little meta and I hope I won’t be misunderstood, since for what I’m about to say a good friend jokingly(?) called me an ingrate. He’s sort of correct and sort of poking fun and sort of posing a profound question.
So, I wrote an essay today. I think it’s pretty good. And I meant every word of it. It’s heartfelt, it reflects my beliefs about reading and writing accurately, it’s got a nice flow to it. But I should be working on my novel.
There’s that infernal “should” I talked about a few posts ago. I really need to write a piece on my take on Pressfield’s War of Art, because while I don’t think it was any kind of mistake to have written that essay per se, my main creative goal is producing fiction and not doing so is a manifestation of Resistance. I’m not an essayist, however good or not good one might think me at it.
Now the part where “ingrate” is correct is I shouldn’t be demeaning my own work if it’s something people enjoy. The friend in question liked the piece and hopefully a lot of other people will too. Maybe it will make their day. That’d be really cool. But end of the day it was a kind of procrastination for me. Something kind of like the thing I want to be doing but not exactly it.
I think it’s better to have your procrastination create something of value that will serve people than to be totally pointless. Maybe today’s essay is something valuable. But I also, for my own sake, for being honest with myself, must acknowledge that there’s part of me that did that so I could feel some accomplishment without tackling my real goals, which are more intimidating. Not insurmountable by any means, I write a lot of fiction, relatively speaking. But I can’t shake the feeling I didn’t spend that time optimally.
And fine. I’m not suggesting horrible guilt or anything. Probably the best response is a calm acknowledgment and then just moving on and doing my best to go after my priority goals for the remainder of today and taking up the battle tomorrow.
I’m not really advising anything here. Maybe you’ve had similar feelings to this. I don’t know the answer. Definitely we can’t call what I did laziness. I wrote. I’m writing right now. But it’s something a little off course. Fine for a day, for a week. Very bad for a month and catastrophic for a year. So in the spirit of practice and improvement, I’m just recognizing what went on today so I can adjust. Maybe it’ll help you do something similar.
I certainly shouldn’t call the essay a waste of time, but I had to get the pun in the title. Sue me.
Viewing:
I straight up watched Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. No shame. Okay, maybe a little. But it was still pretty funny even now being in my mid-thirties. Nothing amazing but a good 3.5/5. Not bad at all.
Reading:
You already know if you’re reading these on the daily. Friggin’ Black Hills. It’s still good. I’m still taking an eternity to read it and that makes me mad. Sigh.
Writing:
See above. I worked a little on a short story today, to be fair to myself, but only like 500 words. I’m toying with the idea of posting daily fiction word counts once I get my new, surely insane, schedule sorted. For some accountability and transparency. Not sure if that’s a good idea or not. Will ponder. Chime in if you think that’s anything you’d find useful or inspiring or whatever.
Listening:
Been revisiting this gem today, As the Kingdom Drowns by Psycroptic. I suppose you’d call this tech-death. It’s fast and wild and fairly heavy. This is my favorite record of theirs because they added a live choir to a bunch of the tracks. Makes for great atmosphere. Eerie. But the best part of this album, and any of their records, is the guitar playing. The best word for the riffs is “byzantine”. They snake their way across bar lines, weirdly intervallic, almost spinning out of control before reaching a resolution. A real joy to listen to for guitar enthusiasts. 4.5/5
Ciao:
That’s all for today. Maybe it helps, maybe it’s rambling gobbledygook. But that’s the great thing about a de facto blog (good grief I hate that word), I just think on the page and you can read it or not. If you do read it, I thank you, wish you a great evening, and will see you tomorrow. Thanks!
You could say that Vladimir Nobokov is a literary genius and you wouldn't hear much in the way of arguments or objections. But if you asked him what his passion was, what it was that made his soul sing, he'd say it was butterflies. Lepidoptera to be more specific. He devoted himself to them completely. Efforts spent on illustrations and descriptions. Untold miles of expeditions and their untold expenses. He said what he hoped to find in art he found in nature, in the study of these insects. He was never given any credence by entomologists. And yet all of that care, that attention, that wonder, that enchantment was imprinted on everything he had ever written.. Would you call that resistance? Laziness? Distraction? Was he procrastinating? Or had he simply found a deeper form of creative connection?
Felt.