Procrastinate? Maybe Later...

Things I am good at:

• Baking (Lemon meringue pie, anyone?)
• Editing (if you have a misplaced comma, I will find it)

Things I am not good at:

• Being clever in a conversation (my snappy comebacks always appear inconveniently in the middle of the night)
• And, apparently, putting my clean clothes away before they've created an Everest of ridiculous proportions.

So, one more thing I'm good at -- procrastinating.  I can hardly confess it....  I mean, not putting clean clothes away sounds like something that a child would have difficulty with.

"Honey, put your clothes away before you go out to play..."

"Ok, Mom, in a minute..."

Right?  And here I am, 27 years old, and I still cannot, for the life of me, manage to just put the clothes away when they are clean.  Instead, I must somehow complete a complex ceremony of waiting until it takes me no less than twenty-nine minutes to fold, hang up, and stow said pile of clothes.

One bright spot -- folding clothes becomes reflective process, one in which I can capture spidery floating thoughts and bend them into a form that makes sense to people who do not happen to live inside my head.

And that is where I found tonights blog post, which does actually have something to do with folding clothes.  I promise!

My original intent in beginning this blog was not only to urge myself to write more, but to chronicle a bit of my mental and spiritual journey into simplicity.  This has been a heart desire of mine for a little over a year as I've peered into the shallow depths of what American culture considers merely "normal."  My desire for simplicity is to live more intentionally, to infuse meaning into what I do.

That being said, I've taken a few tiny steps towards this.  Also, a few slightly larger steps backwards.  And I'm not entirely certain that I'm further along than I was to begin with.  But, I think the intention is the important thing.

It occurred to me that procrastination, although seemingly simpler on the surface, is really a wonderfully complicating thing in my life.  A chore that begins as a two- or three- minute task becomes a half-hour labor.  And meanwhile I guilt myself through my procrastination time.  Easier?  I suppose not.

If I thought procrastination could be so easily cured by epiphany, I suppose I should give it up and be done.  But I think, like all tremulous steps into simplicity, timeliness in chores I dislike will fall into the sweat of my brow category.

Perhaps I should wait until tomorrow to begin...

Perhaps not.