The Last Minute

There are a lot of reasons for procrastination.

I write these words at 4 in the morning. They are scheduled to be uploaded in 6 hours, at 10 am. Realistically, I had all day, all week even, to write these words, and yet I am starting now: Why?

After I got laid off from my last full-time job, I was in a relatively comfortable position: I had several thousand dollars in the bank, and my unemployment compensation easily kept up with my meager needs. I believed, at that time, that I had everything I needed to work on my dream project – a completely different dream project than that which most of you are familiar with, I should mention – and yet, aside from a couple of weeks at the beginning where I set myself ambitious schedules with a moderate-and-quickly-withered degree of success, I got nowhere. I did nothing.

I just existed.

And so on, and so forth, until I ran out of money. And then ran out of available credit card balance. And then ran out of unemployment.

How liberating it was and is to be impoverished and therefore, by default (so to speak), free of the burdens of financial navigation. How glorious it is the be reliant on my creative capacity for my physical and psychological survival. How reassuring it is to know that my physical and mental needs are the only such needs that I am responsible for. How wonderful, how agonizing, how real, how impossible, how indispensable…

The only reason the life I have now is possible is because I let my other one die.

I am writing at 4 in the morning because my lies to myself wear away over the day. Artifice is decayed and only artistry survives. All I can do is express the contents of my mind using the best words I can find – who can ask for more?

Well, in point of fact, I can, and I do. Artistry can only go so far without artifice, without structure or reason. I starve myself of time to foster spontaneity, but though it aids me in my earnest communications it constrains the scope of what I can say.

A calculated procrastination has given me the life I live now, one which is in many ways beautiful and wonderful and fulfilling – but I will not get where I am going next by waiting. I will not get there by stalling. I will not get there by maintaining a holding pattern.

I feel like the time may be coming soon to reach, to leave myself off balance, to push the clock myself instead of letting it tick away. We all have a time to reach for something, a time which we rarely recognize until it passes, and even then perhaps it was only a phantom. Passivity has brought me so much in life that I am terrified to leave its comfort, but I know it is coming.

But: I would never have shared these words with you if I hadn’t waited until the last minute.

I probably never would have shared them with myself.

For now, I keep my back to the wall of time. I hope that someday, maybe not too far away, I will find the strength to be that wall to myself.

Until then I wait.