Pushing away....

A year is not that long a period of time – in my mind the past year just sped by on the swiftest of wings. Add year on year, however and watch as a succession of years pass you by and you realize with a cold metallic dread deep inside that you have not much time left. A day seems so insignificant and yet count the number of days when you have said to yourself “I’ll do that later” or “It can wait for another day”. We create for ourselves a weary debt – promising to do tasks at some later time, a time perhaps that may not even find us capable of doing anything at all. Why do we all push our lives along reluctantly instead of tackling each day, our list of wishes? We keep postponing till tomorrow when tomorrow is not ours to hold on to. Today is what we have and we shamefully neglect that and grasp at an elusive tomorrow, pinning all our hopes on some vague illusory moment of time that may never materialize.

I am a master of postponement. I could write an entire book on the topic but of course I would simply push even that to tomorrow. Everyday I tell myself I should do the things I consider important and everyday I break my promise to do just that. It could be that none of these things are what I want to do or it could be that some tasks on the list are so frightfully difficult that a safe inertia seems desirable. Whatever the reason, I am a procrastinator extraordinaire. There have been a few days in my life when I have simply gone ahead and done something I set my mind on. They have invariably been things that have brought me pleasure and satisfaction or things that I was confident of doing well. The unknown and uncharted as well as the long-drawn, no-easy-solutions kind of problems are the ones that I never act on till its well nigh too late.

I am in the middle of at least three non-easy tasks. One is a lifelong project. The other is something I have wanted to do since I was nine years old and the third is the desire to act on a cause that is very close to my heart. I haven’t made significant progress in any of them – admittedly they all take time but there still needs to be a visible change, a movement towards the goal in question. The frustration therefore builds up – intentions alone will not get you anywhere. And meaningless action just tires you. Targeted action is what’s needed and not my daily procrastination.

Blogging is my way of thinking out aloud. Its the time I sit and look at my thoughts in black and white. I sometimes find solutions to my problems this way. Many a time I do not find answers but there is a feeling of achieving greater clarity in the questions itself. That helps too – oftentimes it is a confused question that befuddles the answer – simplifying what it is that you are looking for is a good way to start. I have always felt that if instead of feeling lost in a nebulous cloud of doubt, you can actually sit down and write an one-line description of what you want to achieve for a task or project or  wish, you are already on the way to getting to your goal.

And now, enough of procrastination – let me get to work :-)