Procrastinating?

Coffee and a plan

Lately it has been late afternoon before I get around to drinking my first cup of coffee. I drink a fancy coffee, latte usually, made with beans I buy from a local roaster who treats each ½# bag as if it were her magnum opus. I have treasured coffee mugs, the perfect size and shape, created by a friend who has made it her life’s work to fill the world with beauty. I make my coffee in a machine my mother-in-law bought me after my daughter was born, because “new mums need good coffee.” (Yes, she says “mums”!) Everything about my daily coffee brings me joy. 

Is it procrastinating if you put off something you really want to do? I have a habit of always wanting to get the hard/unpleasant stuff done first and saving the best for last. This means doing laundry before making a coffee. Prepping dinner before watering plants. Vacuuming before sketching. As a result I often find my plants are wilted and dry and the garden design I promised someone is weeks late and I have to buy decaf coffee beans or stay up half the night. And you don’t even want to ask about that chocolate I’ve been saving, for years!

I am trying to get my head around this problem and how to address it. There are plenty of articles and self-help gurus who can tell me how to stop procrastinating. And there’s a lot of noise out there about self-care. But I think this problem falls somewhere in between the two, and a sensible solution eludes me. How do I carve out time for the important projects and tasks that I enjoy doing? 

Finding a solution is increasingly important as I begin planning (or not planning!) for the upcoming growing season. I have renewed my garden books from the library twice now, and except for a brief burst of uncontrolled indulgence when I first picked them up, I haven’t cracked the covers. That initial peek confirmed that they hold the information I want in order to plan the upcoming season’s flower business, but I am spending my time organizing spreadsheets for taxes, cleaning out files, dusting (dusting! why?!) instead of starting on this project I know will both bring me joy and benefit my business. 

Now, I’m going to make a coffee…

Maybe in the middle of the night tonight I will start the planning.

False Spring

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It is warm today. Warm for January anyway, and there is a bright, sharp sun hanging low in a cloudless blue sky. The air has the clear, slightly damp quality that makes you think of spring. The snow is melting, but slowly, there is a lot of snow here to melt. Icicles drip and break off making little cairns of broken ice on the ground below the eaves of roofs.

I send myself out into this sunlight and dampness. I bundle the baby in his warm suit, the one with the moose antlers that makes him look a little like an unfortunate extra in the school play, and we start to walk. I think he will like seeing the  bright sky and the silhouettes of tree branches from the vantage point of the stroller, maybe he does, but then he is asleep and I am left with only my own thoughts for company. 

I am thinking about spring. In winter I sometimes worry that I am thinking my life away, planning and dreaming of a season that is still months away. But I can’t help myself! I am in love with all the possibilities of spring. Then, as I jam the stroller through a slushy, muddy, slippery patch of half melted ice and standing water and now I can feel the cold wet seeping through my socks, I remember that I hate spring. Not all spring, but early spring for sure. It’s wet, and cold and muddy. And unlike this false spring I am enjoying today, real spring is full of chores and racing the calendar and hoping for the right weather on the day you planned for the job that requires that particular weather. This false spring is a free day, a day without any pressures to mulch tender shoots or to start that next batch of seedlings or call to schedule deliveries of trees and pavers. 

I glance up, at the view the baby would be seeing, if he hadn’t tumbled off to sleep as soon as my steps found a rhythm. There is a magnolia tree, with small, gray, fuzzy flame-shaped buds perfect and upright against the blindingly blue sky. I am no longer dreaming of spring, I am right here, in this winter moment, with all the possibility inside me. Like the magnolia tree, whose feet are also wet and cold, and who is turning itself toward the sun.