There Be Dragons…and Procrastination IS a Fire-Breather
Am I treasure enough for you to face your dragons?
Lianne Raymond wrote this to me – to all of us – in a comment a month ago and I’ve been thinking about it and quoting it ever since.
(Even last night. F quoted Rumi - “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it” – and I quoted Raymond and really we were saying the same thing.)
Let’s be clear: I’m not much of a dragon-slayer. I’m a lover, not a fighter.
Mostly. Unless a stranger says cutting, nunyobiznaz, implying-I’m-a-trashy-mom things to me at the end of How To Train Your Dragon. And then I’ll go there, bitch.
(‘Course afterwards I’ll weep and write ~2,500 words about how badly I feel for calling another woman a bitch – and still think about it six months later.)
So when it comes to demons, dragons, and fears, my usual strategy is to snuggle them into submission. Make friends. Cuddle.
Because here’s what I think: my fears and my dragons are part of me. They are me. To banish them, fight them, or slay them is to to start a war – the thing you attack always fights back – to destroy myself. It is like an amputation. And fear, like limbs – all of which I’m firmly attached to – has a purpose. Fear is a professor.
So I’m keeping all my bits. Even the scary, fire-breathing ones.
Like procrastination.
I procrastinate in three ways: I delay making a decision; I delay responding to people (usually because I haven’t made a decision); and I delay doing.
And, as I wrote to Kareem yesterday, the first two procrastinations cause me – and the people who need me – problems. But the last way I procrastinate is, I’m convinced, simply part of the creative process. Another word for it is incubation. I grow and warm an idea until it springs fully-formed from my head. (Usually at the last possible minute before a deadline.)
I wrote Dave about this recently:
How can I stop procrastinating when there’s such a reward for it? I could work on a piece like a dentist on a bad tooth: poking and pulling until it is a bloody mess…or I could wait until that piece, like a loose tooth, is ready to fall out on its own. Which it will, inevitably – and with a lot less pain, drama and wasted hours in the chair.
To be sure, I do both – push and pull pieces and allow them to fall on their own when they’re ready (and then I polish, shine and carve those calcifications. This is also known as “editing”.). But, I think, letting them come isn’t procrastination. It is parthenogenesis and that’s not a new process for creators. Athena turned out all right.
So that part of procrastination – it just occurred to me that procrastination is in fact a three-headed dragon – and I get along just fine. I simply need to find a way to make peace with the demands of the other two.
Mostly, they’re hungry. We’re all wild when our stomachs or our souls are empty.
And that’s what my last piece was about: commitment. Choosing. Deciding. Cutting – not myself, my limb, my fears, my essentials – to heal, not hurt. Facing and feeding my dragons so I can keep them fat and happy.
Because, after all, we belong together.
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I just love that visual of “an idea springing fully-formed from your head.”
Hilarious!
Overall, a great and different way of looking at procrastination. Makes me feel a tad better about my own problems with that issue.
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This week it’s really been settling in me. Settling me. No longer feeling guilt about not producing constantly. Because, really, it is building, in the background, in the basement of my mind. Thoughts and feelings cavorting without supervision, then wrangled onto the stage at the last minute produce the best creations!
Hugs and butterflies,
~T~
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Thanks for the lovely image of cuddly fire-breathing dragons lounging around my office snoozing & begging for their dragon treats. I wish I could draw it!
Wow! The concept of allowing ourselves to HAVE a process and be truthful with our process vs. all the pressure to make results happen.
I think I’ll put a post-it note on my purse that says, “Don’t forget to pack your kindness, your compassion, and your sense of humor!”
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Kelly, I think you are on to something with the last “dragon head.” I used to cause myself and the people around me so much anxiety because of my “procrastination. BUT as I have come to really know me, I have realized that’s how I work. I need to mull. What looks like procrastination to other people is actually me working…Embrace it. Create new pathways…
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‘Had this quote on my site a month or so ago (via Jen Louden). Seems applicable:
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. (Rilke)
Love this one and, of course, you, my friend.
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Hi again, Kelly!
You’ve brought up a number of topics: Soul searching, facing our fears, procrastination within the art of writing and making hard choices within relationships. It’s difficult to examine these issues within a paragraph or two, but I’ll try.
Procrastination within writing? I see procrastination as creative “processing,” as you do. I also agree with you about relationships: Saying yes about intimacy to Person A may mean a no to Person B, and hence, a door shut on that journey forever. I have a third agreement with your quote about seeking barriers to love within ourselves. But here is where we part. As we go inside to unwind our barriers to accepting love, we also have the opportunity to seek the reasons that built those barriers, as in the fears that set them in place. But fear is such a vague word. It’s one-size-fits-all term for the complexity of the human soul. So doing battle with fear is similar to throwing spears at castle walls without ever glimpsing the enemy within.
For me, those walls of fear got in the way of my happiness and business successes. So I set out to scale the battlements and meet the enemy. Well, I did scale the walls only to find other ones inside, and more inside those, and more and more surrounding the last bastion of defense, a dungeon protecting my Ego; a self made definition that makes me, ME. That confrontation, which I hoped would free me, is the battle I believe you’re referring to when you say, “the thing you attack always fights back.”
You’re right, but sometimes there are exceptions. Many years ago my ego surrendered when I was ready to die, and for a brief 90 seconds I connected to who I really was, and not the definition I had created for myself. That’s how I know we don’t need the dragons although we have BECOME the dragons.
A year ago I was gifted three sessions with a shaman. Immediately after, many of my dragons wondered away on their own fruition. They no longer felt at home, for I had changed, and in just a few hours. Amazing but true. You cannot fight the dragons but you can take their food away. For me, their food was a parental abandonment issue that I had never emotionally resolved. So much of Me grew out of that. When I no longer carried the resentment and anger, the food my for dragons, they got bored and left.
Irv
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I was taking a walk with my mom the other day and saying something like, “I can’t figure out if my instinct not to do the things I think I’m supposed to do to make my life move forward and work is deep intuitive insight that the time isn’t right or if it is simply laziness?” I wasn’t particularly looking for an answer to the question, because whatever the actual answer is (and most likely there is no answer), I seem to have decided to believe it is the first: that I’m trusting an dynamic causality matrix that we all exist within. And I see it all the time. I don’t get ready for some event, I don’t call someone, I don’t write the thing on my todo list and then life unfolds in such a way that it turns out I don’t need to. And it isn’t just about laziness (meaning not using energy that isn’t absolutely necessary to use), this also goes in the other direction. I become over come with a need to stay up to the we hours writing, making, planning and then the next morning it turns out I can use all of this material right away.
Maybe these are excuses. But I don’t care. I’m really into loving my fears and trusting in the deep ebb that carries us.
Thanks for the conversation.
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“Whatever we attack, attacks us back”. The line has made a lasting impression on me….It’s got me to stop thinking and wonder at the sheer truth of it…
I know the entire blog entry was not based on that line – and this line just lead upto what you wanted to say. But the fascinating thing is, that the moment I read that line…It stirred me. And I didn’t really care what the rest of the post said.
Thank you for stirring me…
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So perfectly TIMED this is….I’m sharing this one dear, thank you, thank you.
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I am a dragon slayer because I don’t know how not to be one. It is part of me, though one day I hope to lay down my sword.
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I like what you said about incubation and organic ripening. Sometimes I find when I try and push or force things, the side of me that is not ready will sabotage the process. . .Haven’t heard from you in a while and miss your posts. Hope you are well.
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A nice piece. At the moment I find I myself reading lots of stuff about procrastination – can’t seem to put it off.
I think a lot of procrastination is down to different personality types and I’m sure you are right that some of it is built into the creative process. Unfortunately there are other personalities who have an inner need to make up their minds quickly – too quickly in some cases. Too many of them end up running the world because they look decisive and they tend to give procrastination a bad name. (See http://rod-griffiths.blogspot.com for more of this)
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[...] This is how you habituate yourself to procrastination (the bad kind of procrastination, the one that prevents – rather than incubates – creatio…). [...]
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