"This is scary advice, advice that can give you a difficult and interesting life." I am re-reading a favorite book, Radical Presence: Teaching as contemplative practice (Mary Rose O'Reilly, 1998, Boynton/Cook Publishers). I highly recommend this book to any teacher. My blog title and opening quote are taken from page 43 of this book. I think this advice has a lot to do with procrastination.
To explain, I need to add a little more from Mary Rose O'Reilly. She writes,
"I have a poster of Pablo Cassals on my office door . . . The poster has a quotation that reads ‘Resist doing things that have no meaning in life.' This is scary advice, advice that can give you a difficult and interesting life. You could wind up on the street, and, as for me, I hope that if I wind up there, I have a few musical friends with me and the collected poems or W.B Yeats."
You could wind up on the street
Fear. Life is full of it. We resist walking to the beat of our own drum, finding our own way, answering the call of our vocation in case we fail. We live in fear, rationalized desperately as prudence. Better to play it safe, right? Who says I can fulfill my own destiny, my own dreams? That's not how the world works, right? Who wants a "difficult life?" And, an "interesting life" is make-believe, isn't it?
As I've written before, I learned this past summer that the regrets of the dying are often this act of omission, of not acting, procrastination. So often it is putting off irrationally those tasks, projects and opportunities that define our true selves. Why? I think it has everything to do with the fear that Mary Rose O'Reilly identifies so clearly: Fear of failure.
Fear of Failure
Although the research evidence is equivocal (e.g., see summary of Steel's meta-analysis in contrast to our recent research), no clinician that I know of misses this crucial aspect of our irrational delay. Fear of failure is a common reason given for our failure to act. Why irrational?; because the fear is. We fear the unknown, the possibility of failing. However, we can never know for sure that we'll fail, we simply convince ourselves of this inevitability, and in this, we are irrational.
Meaning, task aversiveness, and procrastination
The quote begins with "resist doing things that have no meaning in life." Certainly, lack of meaning is related to procrastination. It's part of what we understand as task aversiveness, and we all seem to delay tasks that are aversive to us. Who wants to do an aversive task?
The key thing is, the task may only be aversive because it lacks meaning. If we were to follow our hearts and make a commitment to engaging in tasks that are meaningful to us, tasks that define who we are, we would procrastinate less. Resist doing things that have no meaning in life - your life.
Interest
Of course, at the risk of being difficult, the message is also that resisting doing things that have no meaning in our lives will lead to an interesting life. Interest, a key approach emotion, is related to less procrastination in our lives.
Optimism & the Courage to Be
I like how Mary Rose O'Reilly captures the "courage to be" in her own life. She writes,
"as for me, I hope that if I wind up there [on the street], I have a few musical friends with me and the collected poems or W.B Yeats."
Optimism in spite of fear, a vision of the possible in whatever circumstance, positive reappraisal of what might seem a desperate situation, these are the hallmarks of the courage to be and the courage to do.
In the end, if my own pursuits lead me to the "streets" (real or metaphorical), I hope I have a guitar to join my thoughtful colleague Mary Rose O'Reilly; reading more Yeats will just be a bonus!
