Strolling Amok

National Procrastination Week

Here is a commemorative display. I can’t tell what year this might be from, as the March 1-7 simply falls within the “first two weeks of March” mandate. Doesn’t much matter.

With this post, I’m announcing the observance of National Procrastination Week 2016, which actually took place March 6-12. If you Google the holiday, you’ll find two sets of sad cases. One set of crazies takes it as a serious holiday with psychologically therapeutic benefits. The other set takes the Politically Correct stance, decrying the corrosive and harmful effects of frequent procrastination on the psyche. Neither side sees any tongue-in-cheek aspect, and I’ll bet neither side of this tremendously unimportant and indecisive issue is in much demand at chit-chat parties. Life must be earnest but grim when a sense of humor is lacking. Time to be thankful for the little things that aren’t quite so little after all!

Take a moment today, or perhaps sometime later this week, to appreciate your sense of humor. As the great philosopher Mark Twain wisely advised, “Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.” Words to live by. Actually, I often use procrastination (in the form of laziness) to help me sort out errand scheduling issues. I tend to think I need to get something in a timely matter, when it turns out I don’t, and that I can just as easily wait and combine trips to save time and fuel. What seems so important to me at first blush is often revealed to not be so. That also helps make more time available for ongoing tasks which, once I’m in the groove, I don’t like to interrupt.

The reminding picture I get in my head is those RV parks and camping areas where you see the same vehicles lumbering out toward town and then back maybe a half-hour or less later, twice and sometimes three times a day, every day. I assume that it’s boredom and the call of the umbilical to civilized familiarity. Then again, I suppose that if you only occasionally get out to camp for a weekend, you’re not going to have it together and remember everything you were supposed to dig up or bring along. That doesn’t explain why the main (and only) drag in Mormon Lake, AZ on a holiday weekend is overpacked with the mass of ATVs and pickups of people who are just hanging around. It’s sometimes more about good times and escaping from work than it is about camping, and I get it, but I digress.

That’s also one of the mini-perks of procrastinating, at times. I don’t like to put off what must be completed on a deadline. Then again, since I’m retired now, it is my delight to find that there isn’t much of import that falls into that category any more. Without the demands of schedule, my mind is more free to digress into other areas instead of being locked into completing a task. Having always been task-oriented, my tendency is to concentrate on the job at hand, sacrificing everything else to get it done. That excludes smelling or even noticing the roses, ruminating on the Big Questions, and doing anything that feeds the soul. Productivity and accomplishment aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. What really matters tends to get overlooked, so having lived that way for so long, it is now my delight to procrastinate and digress now and then. Gives me a chance to be human.