Every culture promotes timely action, punctuality, promptness and diligence. No society likes postponing things that need to be done promptly. Procrastination, or the act of postponing actions without any credible reason, is an indication of lack of seriousness and focus.
Personally, I don't like procrastination. Specifically not in case of those from whom I expect action - my kids, colleagues - superiors and subordinates alike, friends and almost anyone else from whom I expect some action. I am naturally happy if I get what I want without delay. This is perhaps not so uncommon to be like that. I have seen others like that. Almost all of them. Then what kept me from devoting 10-20 minutes to write a few hundred words as a post to this blog for the last 10 months? My previous post was in June 2021 and I am keyboarding these words in late April 2022.
There is a old saying in my society that nobody knows better than a lazy one. Here, 'knowing' means coming up with various logics and ideas to justify one's laziness. Various pretenses, blaming others, pointing at 'circumstances' that 'hindered' the expected action, even politics, environment and economy. I could not do this because that happened or weather changed for the worse or had a headache or had a bad day and so on and on and on.
I started this blog not to garner a wide audience base (though I would not complain if I get more readership that the meager that I have had so far), to make money out of it or to shine as a writer. I just needed some place to record my feelings and perhaps bring out a 'gem' from inside me that would be publish-worthy some time in future. I do not see myself as a good writer either. Naturally, I find it easy to find fault in others' writing but pardon me if you find a silly mistake in these lines. That's very much like me. I tend to check my sentences and grammar but still I more often than not end up making my sentences too long (like this very one!) and hard to understand, my logic boring and my writing off-the-mark. Still, thank god I at least try. And thank god technology has enabled providers like Google to provide such platforms as blogger.com for free. Since I find it too hard to jot my thoughts every nigh on a hefty diary notebook, online is the tool for me.
But not all is in vain. Sometimes, when I go back to these posts after a long time and evaluate my own writing, I can't stop patting myself on the back for an 'astounding' piece of writing. Even lazy people have ways to motivate themselves.
But would it not have been better if I kept posting at least one piece every week over the past ten months? Not such a steep mountain to climb. An come today, I would have had 40-odd more pieces and if even one of them could satisfy me later on as a good piece of writing, that would have been worth million times more than countless screen minutes I spent scouring articles on flipboard, seeing online news or watching YouTube videos.
Having chastised myself, I have to accept it is not easy to sustain momentum for a long time. Especially when one sees other people belching out bestselling books and widely read articles, in the context of your own little 'useless' pieces of musings in one unknown corner of cyberspace. Believe me, it is indeed hard to sustain that energy and momentum. But, behind every bestseller, there must be a long story of struggle and countless pages ending up inside a dustbin. But as the wider society prefers doing, I also tend to see the result rather than the process behind that result. I do not see the million books that are rejected or thousands that are published but end up in oblivion. I only see those on the bestseller's list. Who am I to complain and who am I to compare my musings with those at the top of the iceberg? Who am I to ignore, though I am fully aware of it, that there is a much bigger unseen part of every iceberg?
Answer: I am nobody but a simple, lazy person searching in vain for a good pretense for my chronic tendency to procrastinate. Don't believe if I one day come out as a writer of any credibility. I do not have any qualities of that success. My morning shows a different and much bleaker kind of a day.
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