On procrastination

In starting this blog, I might also congratulate myself (he said with a sigh) for launching what may well prove to be the most alluring method of procrastination yet.

Though I constantly tell myself that the book is my first priority, I just as constantly find “little things that need doing so why don’t I get them out of the way first.” So I water the plants, check how the stocks in my IRAs are doing, work on replacing the broken passenger side mirror, and soon enough most of the day is somehow gone.

The best I have been able to do is construct a hierarchy of procrastinations, so that I procrastinate from doing the thing that should be first priority by doing something else I do need to do but a little further down the list. While writing a chapter on the story of the four elements, I came across a great source about the tarot which could be mined for a quick addition to an already drafted chapter, about divination with fire. It’s just so tempting to take a little detour… it shouldn’t take long to research and repair a minor gap in a web already woven, rather than pick through and select threads of sources and concept about something new… Soon a day or so has gone by, I have read most of two books on the history of the tarot and yes, made the “finished” chapter a little tighter, but all the threads about how Greek atomists alchemists, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Cartesians and scientists conceived the elements that had been gathered in my head ready to be stitched together lie jumbled in a heap of broken neurons.

Oh well. Whatever the flaws in my process, it reflects something in my character that I need to just accept and get on with it.