Postponements

Postponements

We’re a manana kind of family. We believe there’s no point in doing today what we can so easily put off till tomorrow.  It’s like that old song from the middle of the last century, where “the window she is broken and the rain is coming in; if someone doesn’t fix it, I’ll be soaking to my skin. But if we wait a day or two the rain may go away; and we won’t need a window on such a sunny day.”

 Right. Some problems just go away by themselves if you don’t panic and jump right in to fix them. In my full-time working days, I read of one executive who puts everything marked “Urgent” into a drawer and leaves it there for three weeks. Then, he said, if it’s still important, he’ll deal with it.

I grew up with the old adages, preached diligently by my parents, grandparents and teachers, and figured out my own responses to them:   “A stitch in time saves nine.” (A staple, a bit of Scotch tape or a safety pin saves even the one stitch.) “He who hesitates is lost.” (Well, of course, if you’re lost, it’s best to hesitate until you figure out where you’re going.) Such responses usually got me labeled a smart aleck, and sometimes got me a smart smack on the backside.

Dawdling can bring its share of annoying consequences: staying up most of the night to meet a deadline; paying late charges; frantically trying to get a state inspection sticker on your automobile on the last day of grace period and finding out you need a brake job before you can be legal again; missing the first act; getting an“incomplete” on your semester’s worth of work.

So, here I am – on Tuesday – trying to think up one more collection of smart aleck remarks at the last minute to post on my blog, which I promised myself and myself alone that I would do every Tuesday WOF. Writing is easy to postpone. So easy to be pulled away from a computer.

That laundry has been sitting in the laundry basket since Thursday and I’d better get it folded and put away.

I think the dog’s toenails need clipping.

Do I hear the mailman?

Shouldn’t I bake some bread?

Bad writer. Back to the keyboard.

Okay. So large doses of procrastination are bad for us. Maybe some of Granny’s old adages are right. They have their purpose. Some things won’t wait.

But the other day, in the daily comics, I found the perfect case for procrastination. Dagwood asks Blondie to postpone their argument until after the football game. She replies that in that case, it will have to wait until she gets back from the mall. They concede that by then each one may have forgotten all the “good points” they want to make, but realize it’s a chance they’ll have to take

 Aha! There it is. The best possible use for procrastination.  When a fracas with your nearest and dearest looms, just find a reason to postpone it. Why not? I can find plenty of reasons to postpone cleaning out the hall closet (Unless I have a writing assignment, in which case it’s a perfect procrastination tool.) I can dodge working on next month’s budget until it no longer matters because we’ve already spent all the money. So, why not just put to work all those ingenious shilly-shallying techniques I’ve worked on for a lifetime and come up with a way to postpone an argument.  

“Sorry, Charlie, we’ll have to postpone this argument.  I’ve got to put some cookies in the oven –the kind you like?” 

Knowing how hard it is for us to get back to a task, once abandoned, I can be sure that by the time the cookies come out of the oven, we’ll both have forgotten all our best thrusts and parries.

Assuming, of course, that I actually get around to making the cookies, before I get distracted by something else.

I’d write more, but I just remembered I have a Geezer’s Gathering to go to this afternoon. See you next Tuesday.