I still remember Seth Godin’s blog post of a few years back, “Are you stalling?” It made me uneasy, no doubt because I sensed the answer is “Yes.”
Ironically, less than a month earlier I had passed the 100th day of my 92-day challenge to myself. On Aug. 1, 2020, I had quietly set myself on a quest to see if I could post something here every day through the month of October, or 92 days. It would be a while before I said it out loud, but I sailed right through 92 days, crossed 100 days, and kept on going. This particular post represents my 2,182nd consecutive daily post.
I often convince myself that this regular writing habit is proof that I am not stalling. After all, in these last six years I have published a novel, a novelette, a flash-fiction collection, and six collections of blog posts.
But I must admit, I have been stalling.
I stand up and say to the room, “Hello, my name is Warren Bluhm, and I’m stalling.”
“Hi, Warren,” the room responds.
Now, my instinct is to continue, “I have decided to stop stalling, and by the end of this year, I intend to …”
But remember the part where “it would be a while before I said it out loud”? There is some wisdom in the advice not to announce anything until you have succeeded.
And then again, I have, several times in the past, outlined this same logic and announced that I wasn’t going to announce anything but I might be working on something, and even then the work I was hinting at fizzled out.
And I have now written nearly 300 words about stalling, when I could have simply stopped stalling and gotten busy.
More than 50 years ago, a psychoanalyst named R.D. Laing wrote a very wise book called Knots, in which he illustrated various ways that the mind can twist itself into pretzels. I believe my mind’s ruminating about stalling would have fit very neatly into that book.
I’m still stalling, aren’t I?
“Yep,” says the room.
