On Doing One Thing Instead of Another

Hi!

What are you meant to be doing instead of reading this?

I'm at my desk in my office at the Marion Davies Guest House. I'm meant to be working on poems. Instead, between you and me, I'm

-- checking email,
-- reading a letter from a friend (an actual letter! on paper! from an envelope! with a stamp!),
-- grading some late student papers,
-- looking up movie times for A Star Is Born,
-- watching a video of deer walking into a very blue lake,
-- comparing prices on long sweaters with fringe,
-- texting my sisters, and
-- writing this blog post.

But you know what? Procrastination is my prewriting. Procrastination doesn't look much like the prewriting I learned in poet school -- It has a lot more Arclight seating chart and a lot less "make a list of 20 nouns" than that. It's happy tasks, filling entertainments, that get my mind right to write. I'm not a very disciplined or from-a-dark-place writer -- I write from joy.

So procrastination? The stuff I'm doing instead of writing? Joy fuel. I'm meant to be doing exactly what I'm doing right now.

What if we all felt a little less guilty and a little more in the moment? What if everything we did other than the the thing we were supposed to be doing was exactly the thing we were supposed to be doing?

Here's a still from the video of the deer walking into the very blue lake.

Hope your procrastination is fruitful today. You probably should have a coffee now.


-- Catherine Coan, 10/29/18