Procrastination

Years ago when I first started teaching, I read or heard somewhere that gifted people/children are great procrastinators, and that the smarter a person is, the more he/she procrastinates. Since then I’ve joked about it from time to time, but I wonder tonight as I sit here with deadlines to meet and deadlines that have come and gone un met, if that just might be true? It would be wonderful if I could think my procrastination was due to some supreme giftedness, some intelligence that I haven’t realized in myself, rather than inherent laziness. Lazy is such an ugly word, isn’t it? “Lazy” summons images of the unwashed, unzipped, unbrushed, and plain undone. “Procrastination”, on the other hand, brings a thought of laziness but with a purpose, a putting off while doing other things instead, a busyness that can’t be interrupted in order to do that thing I can’t bring myself to do. In procrastinating I’m not sitting idly by with my feet up eating bon bons. Oh no, I’m inventing things to do so that I won’t have to do the object of my avoidance. It’s quite tiring, really, all this busyness to keep from doing that one little (or not-so-little) task that has become the center of my universe for a little while as I scurry from hither to yon dodging the settling down and the sighing – lots of sighing – that will be necessary to complete it. A lazy person wouldn’t go to all this trouble to type all these words only to have a blog entry, would she? Even with dishes unstacked and bills unpaid and clothes unwashed and papers ungraded, laziness wouldn’t be thinking, processing, typing. . . surely that’s procrastination instead. Surely I’m smart enough to know the difference.