⏱️ on procrastination

Time travel, cycling, Agnieszka Holland and Kasia Adamik’s Spoor, Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Mar 02, 2024

2 March 24 | Vol 3 Issue 1

Now seems like a good time to talk about procrastination. Or maybe a bit later.

For the lack of newsletters over the last few months, I blame not so much on procrastination but medicine. Both the time it takes to be a patient, and the side effects of pharmaceuticals. So more like the related falling-off-the-bike-and-not-being-able-to-get-back-on-it syndrome. Is there a proper name for this affliction?

With the changing of the guard from The Year of The Rabbit to that of The Tiger having slipped past me — the calendar consulted to date these posts with a volume number — it’s time to accept the blooded knuckles, brush down the gravel embedded in the knees, hop back on the virtual bicycle, and wobble off. So excuse me if the path this edition takes is short and unsteady. It’s been a while.

Procrastination is actually I feel, a reasonable response. It’s protective. It’s shielding us from fear. It’s not laziness. You need to do something, you know it’s important, but somewhere in you there’s doubt. That’s why wheeling out the falling off a bike as metaphor vaguely works. I’ll steer away from cycling puns from now on.

Whatever we’re procrastinating about, it’s something that generates anxiety. It’s challenging, it’s something we don’t know or understand, it’s something we find difficult. There are plenty of articles with techniques to beat procrastination — break the work down into smaller sized manageable chunks, make a plan, wear blinkers and stay under the duvet. OK, maybe not the last one. But these only work once you’re back on the saddle. Look, I said no more puns, I’m still going to rinse the cycle crash analogy.

A companion to procrastination is self-recrimination, with a side helping of other selfs; self-criticism and self-depreciation It’s perhaps even a predictable and self-perpetuating step (couldn’t get self-predictable to work here), since we are already in a state of anxiety. [1 ]

One consequence of this mental state is to find yourself in a loop, blaming oneself for having already wasted time, and becoming despondent, which stops us from starting the work, which leads to further self-blame about having wasted the time. And so on, ad infinitum, little fleas on bicycles to bite on. Or something.

This is the getting back on the bicycle moment. Crossing the threshold. How can we escape this liminal state? Time travel is how.

Oh fuck off Julian.

I mean time travel as a metaphor. We're going to leave the bike on the side of the road for a moment and think about a time machine.

When we worry about the time we have wasted, we are worrying about the past. We don’t sit there worrying about the procrastination we are going to do in the future. We don’t have procrastination goals. It’s time already spent.

And by dwelling on this “wasted” time, we are inhabiting the past. Worse than that, we are bringing the past into the present. Our time machine is making our present the past.

But it does not matter whether you wasted time in the past. Simply because it is the past. It can not touch you now. Only the now can affect you now. You can’t affect the past but you can affect the present.

Ask yourself: Do you want to drag the past into the present, or do you want to push the present into the future?

Should you find yourself stuck in a self-referential loop of wasted time thoughts, think of your time machine. If you could change what you did in the past, what would you do? Not procrastinate. The answer is that simple. Don’t be the past you regret. Be the present.

You can change the effects of the past simply by not letting it be the consequence of the present. By getting back on our time travelling bicycle hybrid thingy we can drive the present into the future. The future does not have to be the past. We have the power to change it, simply by doing. And it doesn’t matter if what we do isn’t that great at first, a wobbly ride trying to keep on the pavement, because we can always improve. But we can’t improve if we aren’t already riding.

I’ve consumed a fair amount of media these last four months of radio silence. I've also danced for hours as a form of therapy and exercise, more on that in a later post, but now, since the now is topical I’m going to recommend the film Spoor.

It’s an adaptation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, the novel by Olga Tokarczuk. It’s also the sort of tenuous segue I’m fond of, bridging time travelling bicycles and the film by hanging it on the single word drive.

I’ve started reading the book. I’m late to the party. Not because of procrastination, but simply not realising it’s exactly the sort of book I relish. It took seeing the film, which I watched out of curiosity, to do that.

It’s no secret I’m fairly disparaging about the average Hollywood film with its dumbing down of ambiguity through over-explaining (see on the Statham test). Spoor has a wonderful Europa sensibility to it. It unfolds slowly. It appears to be slow cinema, an Eastern European paean to enduring rural life maybe (see Le quattro volte), before morphing into something far more astute. A marvellous sleight of hand.

I have deliberately chosen a trailer with no subtitles, since it’s best enjoyed knowing as little as possible, with no expectations. To be aware even of the genre would mean watching it within a Hollywood framework. Aside from its rural setting, it’s a breath of fresh air, with its leisurely pacing, and seemingly meaningless idiosyncrasies of the protagonist — an older, slightly batty woman living alone with her dogs. An atypical hero in Hollywood plots. Unless she happens to be an ex-spy, an expert in unarmed combat and improvised weaponry. Spoiler: she’s not.

There’s a trailer with subtitles on Youtube, but rather than seek it out, use your detective skills to uncover a way to watch the film. And when you do, stay with it, by the end you’ll be whooping with delight and air punching. At least I was.

Here, just for shits and giggles, is the trailer for Le quattro volte, to which Spoor shares a certain sensibility, at least in its opening acts. But Spoor wanders into — and off — a much darker, and surprising path into the woods.

By all means read the book.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk | Buy here

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Tokarczuk

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_quattro_volte

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_and_Hobbes

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References

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/can_self_compassion_overcome_procrastination
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/019188699290173M

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