A prominent man in my life often admonishes others to "Stop and smell the roses!". He says it has worked for him and he is over 90!
How to Stop Time
By ANNA DELLA SUBIN
IN
the unlikely event that we could ever unite under the banner of a
single saint, it might just be St. Expeditus. According to legend, when
the Roman centurion decided to convert to Christianity, the Devil
appeared in the form of a crow and circled above him crying “cras, cras”
— Latin for “tomorrow, tomorrow.” Expeditus stomped on the bird and
shouted victoriously, “Today!” For doing so, Expeditus achieved
salvation, and is worshiped as the patron saint of procrastinators.
Sometimes you see icons of him turned upside down like an hourglass in
the hope that he’ll hurry up and help you get your work done so he can
be set right-side up again. From job-seekers in Brazil to people who run e-commerce sites in New Orleans,
Expeditus is adored not just for his expediency, but also for his power
to settle financial affairs. There is even a novena to the saint on
Facebook.
Expeditus
was martyred in A.D. 303, but was resurrected around the time of the
Industrial Revolution, as the tempo of the world accelerated with
breathtaking speed. Sound familiar? Today, as the pace of our lives
quickens and the demands placed on us multiply, procrastination is the
archdemon many of us wrestle with daily. It would seem we need Expeditus
more than ever.
“Procrastination,
quite frankly, is an epidemic,” declares Jeffery Combs, the author of
“The Procrastination Cure,” just one in a vast industry of self-help
books selling ways to crush the beast. The American Psychological Association
estimates that 20 percent of American men and women are “chronic
procrastinators.” Figures place the amount of money lost in the United
States to procrastinating employees at trillions of dollars a year.
A recent infographic in The Economist
revealed that in the 140 million hours humanity spent watching “Gangnam
Style” on YouTube two billion times, we could have built at least four
more (desperately needed) pyramids at Giza. Endless articles pose the
question of why we procrastinate, what’s going wrong in the brain, how
to overcome it, and the fascinating irrationality of it all.
But
if procrastination is so clearly a society-wide, public condition, why
is it always framed as an individual, personal deficiency? Why do we
assume our own temperaments and habits are at fault — and feel bad about
them — rather than question our culture’s canonization of productivity?
I
was faced with these questions at an unlikely event this past July — an
academic conference on procrastination at the University of Oxford. It
brought together a bright and incongruous crowd: an economist, a poetry
professor, a “biographer of clutter,” a queer theorist, a connoisseur of
Iraqi coffee-shop culture. There was the doctoral student who spoke on
the British painter Keith Vaughan, known to procrastinate through
increasingly complicated experiments in auto-erotica. There was the
children’s author who tied herself to her desk with her shoelaces.
The
keynote speaker, Tracey Potts, brought a tin of sugar cookies she had
baked in the shape of the notorious loiterer Walter Benjamin. The German
philosopher famously procrastinated on his “Arcades Project,” a
colossal meditation on the cityscape of Paris where the figure of the
flâneur — the procrastinator par excellence — would wander. Benjamin
himself fatally dallied in escaping the city ahead of the Nazis. He took
his own life, leaving the manuscript forever unfinished, more evidence,
it would seem, that no avoidable delay goes unpunished.
As
we entered the ninth, grueling hour of the conference, a professor laid
out a taxonomy of dithering so enormous that I couldn’t help but
wonder: Whatever you’re doing, aren’t you by nature procrastinating from
doing something else? Seen in this light, procrastination begins to
look a lot like just plain existing. But then along come its foot soldiers — guilt, self-loathing, blame.
Dr.
Potts explained how procrastination entered the field as pathological
behavior in the mid-20th century. Drawing on the work of the
British-born historian Christopher Lane, Dr. Potts directed our
attention to a United States War Department bulletin issued in 1945 that
chastised soldiers who were avoiding their military duties “by passive
measures, such as pouting, stubbornness, procrastination, inefficiency
and passive obstructionism.” In 1952, when the American Psychiatric
Association assembled the first edition of the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — the bible of mental health used
to determine illness to this day — it copied the passage from the
cranky military memo verbatim.
And
so, procrastination became enshrined as a symptom of mental illness. By
the mid-60s, passive-aggressive personality disorder had become a
fairly common diagnosis and “procrastination” remained listed as a
symptom in several subsequent editions. “Dawdling” was added to the
list, after years of delay.
While
passive-aggressive personality disorder has been erased from the
official portion of the manual, the stigma of slothfulness remains. Many
of us, it seems, are still trying to enforce a military-style precision
on our intellectual, creative, civilian lives — and often failing. Even
at the conference, participants proposed strategies for beating
procrastination that were chillingly martial. The economist suggested
that we all “take hostages” — place something valuable at stake as a way
of negotiating with our own belligerent minds. The children’s author
writes large checks out to political parties she loathes, and entrusts
them to a relative to mail if she misses a deadline.
All of which leads me to wonder: Are we imposing standards on ourselves that make us mad?
Though
Expeditus’s pesky crow may be ageless, procrastination as epidemic —
and the constant guilt that goes with it — is peculiar to the modern
era. The 21st-century capitalist world, in its never-ending drive for
expansion, consecrates an always-on productivity for the sake of the
greater fiscal health.
In
an 1853 short story Herman Melville gave us Bartleby, the obstinate
scrivener and apex procrastinator, who confounds the requests of his
boss with his hallowed mantra, “I would prefer not to.” A perfect
employee on the surface — he never leaves the office and sleeps at his
desk — Bartleby represents a total rebellion against the expectations
placed on him by society. Politely refusing to accept money or to remove
himself from his office even after he is fired, the copyist went on to
have an unexpected afterlife — as hero for the Occupy movement in 2012.
“Bartleby was the first laid-off worker to occupy Wall Street,” Jonathan
D. Greenberg noted in The Atlantic.
Confronted with Bartleby’s serenity and his utter noncompliance with
the status quo, his perplexed boss is left wondering whether he himself
is the one who is mad.
A
month before the procrastination conference, I set myself the task of
reading “Oblomov,” the 19th-century Russian novel by Ivan Goncharov
about the ultimate slouch, who, over the course of 500 pages, barely
moves from his bed, and then only to shift to the sofa. At least that’s
what I heard: I failed to make it through more than two pages at a
sitting without putting the novel down and allowing myself to drift off.
I would carry the heavy book everywhere with me — it was like an anchor
into a deep, blissful sea of sleep.
Oblomov
could conduct the few tasks he cared to from under his quilt — writing
letters, accepting visitors — but what if he’d had an iPhone and a
laptop? Being in bed is now no excuse for dawdling, and no escape from
the guilt that accompanies it. The voice — societal or psychological —
urging us away from sloth to the pure, virtuous heights of productivity
has become a sort of birdlike shriek as more individuals work from home
and set their own schedules, and as the devices we use for work become
alluring sirens to our own distraction. We are now able to accomplish
tasks at nearly every moment, even if we prefer not to.
Still,
humans will never stop procrastinating, and it might do us good to
remember that the guilt and shame of the do-it-tomorrow cycle are not
necessarily inescapable. The French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote
about mental illness that it acquires its reality as an illness “only
within a culture that recognizes it as such.” Why not view
procrastination not as a defect, an illness or a sin, but as an act of
resistance against the strictures of time and productivity imposed by
higher powers? To start, we might replace Expeditus with a new saint.
At
the conference, I was invited to speak about the Egyptian-born novelist
Albert Cossery, a true icon of the right to remain lazy. In the
mid-1940s, Cossery wrote a novel in French, “Laziness in the Fertile
Valley,” about a family in the Nile Delta that sleeps all day. Their
somnolence is a form of protest against a world forever ruled by tyrants
winding the clock. Born in 1913 in Cairo, Cossery grew up in a place
that still retained cultural memories of the introduction of Western
notions of time, a once foreign concept. It had arrived along with
British military forces in the late 19th century. To turn Egypt into a
lucrative colony, it needed to run on a synchronized, efficient
schedule. The British replaced the Islamic lunar calendar with the
Gregorian, preached the values of punctuality, and spread the gospel
that time equaled money.
Firm
in his belief that time is not as natural or apolitical as we might
think, Cossery, in his writings and in his life, strove to reject the
very system in which procrastination could have any meaning at all.
Until his death in 2008, the elegant novelist, living in Paris,
maintained a strict schedule of idleness. He slept late, rising in the
afternoons for a walk to the Café de Flore, and wrote fiction only when
he felt like it. “So much beauty in the world, so few eyes to see it,”
Cossery would say. He was the archetypal flâneur, in the footsteps of
Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire, whose verses Cossery would steal
for his own poetry when he was a teenager. Rather than charge through
the day, storming the gates of tomorrow, his stylized repose was a perch
from which to observe, reflect and question whether the world really
needs all those things we feel we ought to get done — like a few more
pyramids at Giza. And it was idleness that led Cossery to true
creativity, dare I say it, in his masterfully unprolific work.
After
my talk, someone came up to ask me what I thought was the ideal length
of a nap. Saint Cossery was smiling. Already one small battle had been
won.
Anna Della Subin is a writer and contributing editor at Bidoun, a Middle East arts and culture magazine.
No comments:
Post a Comment