Month: September 2022

Procrastination and mortality

I keep returning to some themes. While browsing my old stuff the other night, I found this from Aug. 13, 2013 …

If not now, when?

What is it you’ve been meaning to do?

The time to do it is now.

“It can wait; I have time to get it done.” Perhaps. But time runs out.

The time you have left is already under way.

A couple weeks earlier on July 29, I posted:

While you can

So much to say, so much to do …

We all have the same number of minutes per day, but we don’t have the same number of days. We know how many minutes per day we have; we don’t know how many days.

Fret not over the reality that your days are finite; what can you say or do that is infinite, that lasts, that will still be making its impact when you are gone?

Say it. Do it.

Say what you can, do what you can, while you can.

And fret not that you could have done more: You did this.

– – –

Then, as now, I was preoccupied with getting things done. Around the same time I wrote a post about a couple dozen projects I had started but not finished. Procrastination was, then as now, one of my worst habits. The fact that my time on this planet is finite, then as now, weighed on my conscience.

Reading those old posts, I almost threw up my hands and thought that nothing has changed — I’m still the guy with big ideas he never gets around to finishing. 

Almost.

Then I remembered that when I wrote these posts nine years ago, I had published seven books — four with my name on it and three editions of works in the public domain. I now have 21 books out there — the 12th with my name on it comes out Oct. 18, and I’ve released nine public domain books. One of the original seven — The Adventures of Mike Phoenix — was a collection of four novelettes and a short story. It’s been replaced by Mike Phoenix: The Complete Novelettes, which is 16 novelettes and two short stories.

We can fuss and fret about the pace of progress, because we do have a limited time on this earth. Or we can open our eyes a little, celebrate the evidence of real progress, and get on with it. That was my advice to you and to myself in those two blog posts above, and it’s still valid.

Getting upset about our procrastination is just another way of procrastinating.

Indivisible

© Flownaksala | Dreamstime.com

It caught me off guard, and I have no idea if anyone else even noticed. But it was an interesting omission.

I was at one of those events where they decided to start by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Everyone dutifully put their hands over their hearts, and the leader led the way.

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.”

I felt like I was the only one who thought, “Wait, what?” The event went on unabated, and no one remarked that the pledge leader had forgotten the word, “indivisible.” 

The more I thought about it, the more I thought how appropriate a mistake it was. 

Most people think the nation is more divisible than ever. For years the practitioners of practical politics have been working as hard as they can to drive a wedge between people, to the point where the phrase “civil war” finds itself on people’s lips and poll questions.

H.L. Mencken’s famous line is, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

The pending civil war is another one of those imaginary hobgoblins, and the politicians who play with that fire are hoping the populace clamors to be led to safety from civil war by, say, suspending the Constitution and rounding up all the people who disagree with the party in power. By playing with that particular fire, of course, they risk getting us all badly burned.

The best way to counter the foolishness that is contemporary politics is not to take the bait. When someone tries to divide us into “us and them,” talk about how much we have in common. And you know what we have MOST in common? Most of us are sick and tired of people who try to divide us. 

I think people in general are more indivisible than the politicians give us credit for.

Flamingos from Another Dimension

© Alexandra Petruk | Dreamstime.com

And then every so often I have this urge to just write whatever wild story springs to mind about a pterosaur climbing out of the ocean and toppling skyscrapers and puny humans crying out for rescue. A heroic figure stands, arms akimbo, surveying the scene, and says, “I think I can do something about this.”

But suddenly cartoon flamingos from another dimension appear from nowhere and pull a previously unnoticed plug in the pterosaur’s heel, causing it to deflate like a Thanksgiving parade balloon. 

“I didn’t see that coming,” the hero admits, not noticing the train thundering up behind him. A woman in a toga tackles him out of the way, and as they lie next to the train tracks, he gasps and says, “You saved my life again,” to which she sighs and replies, “I know. You’d be dead several times over without me, and that would be no fun indeed.”

Just as suddenly, the whole scene vanishes, characters and trains and dinosaur and all, and life goes on as if none of it ever happened, because, well, quite literally, it never did.