3.4 confronting my laziness

is it procrastination, am I making excuses, all those questions

it’s hard and sometimes i hate it so I buy expensive fountain pens and spend hours filling them and cleaning them

I took a picture of two of the pages in my book because sometimes I really hate these pages and I didn’t know what else to do with my irritation. Sometimes it helps to document the truth about how painful this work is. I didn’t want to read them, the title was boring, my cat looked super comfortable, and maybe I should change pens? Maybe I should just change the ink. Yeah, I’ll do that.

In a couple of places in my notes say things like “skipped” or “did not read X.” Then when I see those notes at the start of my next session, I feel more irritated with myself than with the material, so I go back and read the things I skipped.

I’m not lazy. I work hard. I know these things because the evidence is scattered all throughout my life. But in the moment? Yeah, I’m lazy. And I don’t always work hard.

Sometimes it really is “the forest for the trees.” By that I mean that these micro occasions of guilt-ridden laziness or fatigue or whatever you want to call it, will actually add up to great ideas many hours later—maybe even many days/weeks/months later. It’s also possible that those sections I skip will never actually help me in any way. Perhaps I can skip them and it will never matter.

But the overall daily grind is helpful in a big-picture, macro way, not necessarily in a detail-focused, micro way. I don’t actually “need” every single thing that I read. I’m pouring over a 13th-century historical chronicle—some of it is likely completely fabricated, and all of it is someone’s point of view, a point of view that I don’t share and maybe don’t agree with. Some of it was contemporaneous (more or less) and other parts were added later. And we just don’t know a lot of what we would need to know in order to be sure that it’s “true truth,” as one of my history professors used to remind us.

Sometimes I go back over the parts I skipped, and it suddenly feels so much easier to read. Sometimes it’s just as opaque and boring. I’m sure some of it will matter to me eventually and most of it won’t.

On my really good days, I trust my future self, that I’ll know the difference.

Meanwhile, I clean pens, pet the cat, and skip parts of things in this book. I try to remember that throughout my life, I have done hard things. Some of them turned out okay, supported by the things I learned from the ones that didn’t.