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Dodging Procrastination

I am putting off again. I opened my window to let the sweet summer air in and I hear someone cutting the grass. I think, my grass needs cutting. I should cut my grass. Cutting my grass is not on my list today. Tomorrow, it can be cut. I can put it on my list tomorrow and do it without the guilt of not doing the things on my list today. I did put the things on my list for today because it was important that I do them today.
Photo by noor Younis on Unsplash

And they are still on my list at 5 o’clock in the afternoon.

I have read much about procrastination, eating the frog, having courage to take action. Still I sit here. Tea today is Grapefruit Squeeze.

I am not a bad person. Although the little voice in my head tells me that when I see others move passed my on the way to their goals and mine are still out of arm’s reach. I am not a lazy person. I have accomplished many worthwhile things.

I am distractible, like many. And, like many, I am afraid.

For me, procrastination only equals fear.

In his blog, Zen Habits, Leo Babauta agrees with me:

At its root, procrastination is almost always based on some kind of fear. And figuring out how to beat that fear is the key to un-procrastination, in the long run.

Quick fixes are fine, but if the fears remain unabated, they will continue to act on you, causing you to want to procrastinate despite your best intentions.

So how do you beat fear? One of the reasons fear can be so powerful is because it lurks in the dark — unnoticed, in the recesses of our minds, it acts without us knowing it. So the first step is to shine some light on it — fear hates light. The light is our attention, our examining of the fears, our taking a close look at them to see if they’re rational or baseless.

Once we’ve shined a light on the fears, we can beat them with information. For example, if you’re afraid you’re going to fail, well, do a small test and see. If you don’t fail, that’s information — you now know that, at least with a small test, you won’t necessarily fail. Keep repeating the tests and you’ll gather a lot of information that is contrary to the fear, beating the fear because you now know with good certainty that it’s baseless.

Shine a light on the fear, run small tests, and beat it with information….

…Some Procrastination Fears

A number of fears contribute to procrastination, including but not limited to:

Fear that you’ll fail or do badly. Probably the most common one.

Fear of the unknown — the task is not familiar to you, so you don’t know what to do or where to start.

Fear of the uncomfortable. It’s easy to do things we’re comfortable with, but doing new things is uncomfortable so we put them off.

Fear of starting in the wrong place. You don’t start because what if you’re not starting the right way?

These are all obviously related, and they can be summed up as “fear of failure or not being good enough”. (Zen Habits)

I am aware of the problem. I acknowledge it. I know that I am the only solution. And still here I sit with my list not finished.

So I move. Although not perfectly, I am internalizing this belief to push me through:

No one is watching.

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.” — David Foster Wallace

And…

“Nobody cares what you are doing.”
Obscurity is not a problem. It’s an opportunity. It allows you to lay the first brick in your idea without a judging panel. Then, you might find the confidence to lay another. And then another. Safe in your shroud of being a nobody, you have full reign to take whatever type of material you like and build whatever type of legacy you want. (Todd Brison)

And I am done.

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The Break

“The most common way for people to give up their power is by thinking that they don’t have any” – Alice Walker (epigraph, The Break)

Photo by Brendon Thompson on Unsplash

Katherena Vermette’s book, The Break, is real. Curled in my reading chair with one of my mother’s scrap quilts wrapped around my legs drinking Darjeeling Green Tea (so smooth), I am struck by how real the characters are. It is woven with the perspectives of many people. Although the book feels like it is about the strength of women and community and love, I found it interesting that the only two male characters that are developed reflect Canada now. The relations between colonials and First Nations are taking the headlines from speech by Justin Trudeau in front of the UN General Assembly to committees for residential schools and missing and murdered indigenous women. The two police officers, Officers Scott and Christie, are the two sides of that story.

Officer Christie is a personification of beliefs that seem to pull at current affairs. When he first shows up in the story, he is bored, curt and uninterested. To him, it is just another “nates” fighting “nates” story. Through Christie, I can hear conversations in coffee shops and around lunch tables as Canadians in cities and towns speak about the First Nation headlines: higher than average suicide rates; higher than average drug and alcohol addictions; run down housing communities; social assistance-ne’er-do-well. Christie is mild prejudice shows in his lack of effort to investigate the events. He refers to his partner, Tommy Scott, as May-tee. I can hear him saying something like, “I am the least racist person in the world. Look, I like the guy.”

And Tommy Scott, is First Nations. He is trying to fit in to the colonial world. His wife wants to embrace the Pomp and Circumstance of Indigenous pageantry, without seeing the underbelly. Tommy is learning to speak up. He shyly indicates his heritage on his employment forms. He is conscious of how he presents himself to his superiors and his colleagues. It is through Tommy’s perseverance that Christie begins to listen. He begins to hear the story that is playing out through the crime. He steps in and helps.

Is this the story of Canada?

The Break’s storyline is a fictional depiction of Trudeau’s speech:

“Our efforts to build a better relationship with Indigenous Peoples in Canada are not only about righting historical wrongs. They are about listening, and learning, and working together. They are also about concrete action for the future. The reconciliation we seek has lessons for us all. We can’t build strong relationships if we refuse to have conversations. We can’t chart a more peaceful path if the starting point is suspicion and mistrust. And we can’t build a better world unless we work together, respect our differences, protect the vulnerable, and stand up for the things that matter most…” (http://bit.ly/2EhJFUj)

Officers Christie and Scott are Canada.

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The Way of the Labyrinth

With a hint of lost blossoms, Strawberry Rose tea reminds me that nurture and environment create a life more than biology and ancestry.

When I was talking to friends about the book I was reading, The Lonely Hearts Hotel, by Heather O’Neill, I said that I felt compelled to keep reading because the author used good words. I felt bad continuing also. It was like a car accident on the other side of the highway. Even though it doesn’t affect you, everyone slows down to watch. And it gets into your head when you explain to everyone how traffic was. I felt so far removed from Rose and Pierrot that I didn’t think I could understand them.

“We all struggle with contradictions. Contradictions are marvelous. If you don’t believe that everything contains contradictions, then there is very little you can understand. We know ourselves by embracing what we are not. We become good by taking evil head-on.”
“Exactly!” exclaimed the clown. “You can’t have land without water. You can’t have water without land.” (page 218)

The story is about me, though. It is about everyone who has struggled to become more of who you are.

“It’s going to be wonderful,” Rose exclaimed. “All these paintings where he sticks a nose on a cheek and an eyeball on a forehead. He captures the modern condition. All our thoughts are fractured. Everything is a dead end. You have to look at something from all angles at once to see it from the inside out. Not just be obsessed with the obvious, stereotypical way of looking at something, you know? To make things appear as they really are.” (page 208)

Rose and Pierrot are placed in pitiful circumstances at the centre of a labyrinth and they are told to find their way out. (Indulge me for a moment…a poetic metaphor came to me as I was thinking about this book) Wrong turns and right ones, they couldn’t know which way they were heading until they looked back to see their path. They/we can sometimes go back over the same trail to discover where they/we need to go. When we think about the path, we discover that all the turns were the right ones to get us to where we are right now.

Rose couldn’t put a finger on what had happened to her. But she had fallen from grace. That was the most surprising thing. Because she had not realized that she had been in a state of grace. She had at least figured that as an orphan she had been born with nothing to lose. When you fall from grace, time passes quicker. Time begins to make sense. It moves in a linear fashion. It begins to trickle through the hourglass. It no longer belongs to you. (page 361)
Our labyrinth doesn’t come from us making a choice to step inside it. It comes from us standing in the middle. We start with who we are. We gather wisdom with each turn that we can use or not. If we can get out, we will have all that we could be and the possibilities are wide open.

Or we keep wandering around, feeling like… “the best we can hope for from life is that it is a wonderful depression.” (page 380)

If our life is like a labyrinth, I wonder if there is a string that we can follow to make better choices, or maybe there are different coloured strings that can lead us to different places.

Rose and Pierrot picked up the different strings of those that would have them follow their path. They couldn’t know until they had walked along the path whether it was the right one or not.

Allowing for art to imitate life, what string are you following through your labyrinth? Do you need to find a different one? How close are you to having wide open possibilities for becoming? It might just be a couple of steps. Take them.

 

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Days of Awe — Mahler

I am taking another dip into a Day of Awe.  What cup of tea is reminiscent of classical music? Ah, deep black Yunnan tea.

I wanted to bring all my senses into the experience of awe. So much of our view of the world is visual, and there is so much richness in the other senses. I recall reading somewhere, that no animal can survive if they are deaf. The loss of hearing is more detrimental than the loss of sight. I see that in my father as he sits watching his family laugh and play without being able to be in on it. My father has lost a lot of his hearing. He has hearing aids. When the group of us get together, the hearing aids can become just a bunch of noise. He makes up for it by taking lots of pictures.

I began exploring haunting music. Music, more than other art, seems to be personal. My husband is a big Led Zeppelin fan and I could take it or leave it. Classical music doesn’t seem to have the same polarizing effect. To experience awe from a rich melody, if you don’t care about classical music, I suggest you watch Ben Zander’s TED talk before listening to a most beautiful Mahler symphony.

 

My awe practice for today is to listen to Mahler’s Adagietto Symphony 5. It reminds me that there is beauty in the world and in the heart. Listen with an open mind and open heart, and let time stop.

When Time Stops

In the fading forest a bird call sounds.
How out of place in a fading forest.
And yet the bird call roundly rests
in this moment that it made,
as wide as the sky above the fading forest.

All things sound together in that cry:
the whole land seems to lie within it,
and the moment, which wants to persist,
stops, still, as if knowing things
arising from that cry
that you would have to die to know.

Rainer Maria Rilke