a desire to dawdle

When you get to a certain age, and you realize you probably have limited time left to do all the things you want to do, the smart thing would be to start doing all the things you want to do.

      Instead, like many of us, I procrastinate. Thinking we still have endless time, when we don’t any longer.

      To be honest, I’ve been putting off writing about this, but it’s probably time for me to say something about it. I would have said something about procrastinating last week, but, you know, I just could never get around to it.

      But first, before I get to it now, let me tell you about the time my wife and I were driving in Italy and it was snowing and we don’t speak Italian. Or that may have been when we were in France, where it was raining and we speak French.

      Let me check. I have that information right here, somewhere.

      Although we do speak French, I recall that nevertheless we couldn’t make ourselves understood when talking with this woman who was coming into our building and carrying a number of grocery bags. On the other hand, she may have been Slovenian and I think it was grocery bags, but if you’ll give me a minute, I’ll look it up and see if I still have that picture which is either on my phone or somewhere in the closet in my office. I just need to organize the pictures in the office closet first.

      Wait, where was I? Oh, yes, I wanted to talk, finally, about procrastinating.

      And I’ll do so in just a moment, right after I check to see if the mail has come already and what the weather’s going to be like in Phoenix in April in case we’re going to be in Phoenix in April. Of course, it’s possible it will be too hot then, which means we can’t go and instead will consider going to Maine. It’s cooler there, right?

      I’ll check, which I’ll do right after I look up the definition of procrastinating in the dictionary. Which reminds me: did you know the definition of procrastinate comes right after the definition of proconsul, which is a governor or military commander of an ancient Roman province? I didn’t know that either. Or maybe I did.

      Well, in any case, it turns out that procrastinating means delaying, postponing, dawdling and generally dragging your feet. For instance, I’ve been dragging my feet since last Tuesday, which is when I should have finished this story on procrastination and also gotten new shoes because my old ones were scratched from too much dragging.  

      So, yes, procrastinating can be debilitating. But it does have its good points. That’s why I’m pro crastinating, not against crastinating. And here are the real reasons why:

      If you can put off for tomorrow what you were supposed to do today, that means you’ll have more time today to put off things until next week. If you can put off everything until next week, it means you’ll have this whole week to do all the things you promised to do in July of 2014.

Or not.