Procrastination

Procrastination is my sin. It brings me naught but sorrow. I know that I should stop it. In fact, I will - tomorrow ~Gloria Pitzer

My last post was by way of an open letter to Life: It said “are we not finished yet? Why is it that I cannot get this book to the agent?

I could hear Life laughing. “So miss clever clogs, you pretend you are waiting on me, while all the time you know I’m waiting on you. And no, you’re not finished with this healing process and you cannot publish until you have finished, so stop procrastinating”

All week I have been listening to Life’s messages. Everything that has happened during these last seven days is full of clues, indicators and information. The message that came in two days ago was filled with irony and Life’s incessant humour: someone asked me to read and comment on a manuscript which must be at least 200,000 words in length, has been at least 25 years in the writing and is probably a series of three books. Well what could I say?  
                                                                                                                                          This week I heard for the first time that a family friend had been struggling with stomach cancer for about two years now, and had half her small intestines removed. When I asked whether she was now in remission, she said yes, but needed to have two further operations. Well I’m in remission too, but need to have at least one, if not two more operations. In fact I need as many operations as it takes.
  
Okay, okay, I get the message. It’s time to retreat and go into that place of total silence which I tried to do last week but all those recorded programmes, especially Criminal Minds, held me enthralled. I also allowed a host of other things as well as people to intervene. But I’m ready now to have my own operation; I’ve been putting it off for long enough, more than a year now.

But my operation is not conducted in an operating theatre by a surgeon with scalpel and an anaesthetist. It’s conducted by my own body, as long as I create the conditions within which it can do so, and it is here my resistance kicks in. I don’t want to do the pre-op preparations. I cannot summon up the discipline to do a 10-day fast in total meditative silence.

I am going to teenage-sit this Easter weekend, and then I’ll begin.

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