procrastination & completion

Full transcript at the bottom of the page.

Do you consider yourself a procrastinator?

For years, I wrestled and struggled with my own avoidant behavior patterns. Maybe you’re like me—many who knew me would playfully scoff at my procrastination-confessions.

side note: And if you find yourself surrounded by people who reinforce this trait—that “you always procrastinate”—maybe reconsider the amount of time you share with them.

“Procrastinating was my best effort to avoid an anticipated uncomfortable feeling.”

I avoided feeling the sadness and disappointment of endings by putting off the work to complete projects, clinging to the thrill of anticipation. If it’s still ahead of me, then I still have something to look forward to. This sentiment brought its sneaky little side-kick: I cannot be criticized since the project remains unfinished. #nope. I tried to hide from the guilt and shame, but—and—no matter where I went, there I was… putting myself through purgatory, in limbo.

Really it was a hell of my own making.

Yes, I managed to complete things, somehow. The necessary expectations and demands from work and other commitments motivated me to get things done. Yet I couldn’t seem to take action on many of the inspiring ideas when they came to me. It sounds cliché, but in particular I mean those ideas and dreams that felt like part of my true passion or calling.

Everything I did complete seemed perpetually less-than, not-enough.

I went digging, deep. Energetic, soul-level archaeology, I like to call it. In procrastination lie the questions, “where do I exist?” and “who am I?” And the resistance to an expectation of some fear realized.

“I reached into the darkness of what I feared and found the lightness I sought. Completion—death—is the portal to immortality.”

My two-step + triple-ball-change helped me come around, full circle, to a place of satisfaction upon completion of projects. Recognize. Simplify. Allow, accept, embrace.

Recognize that expectations set us up for disappointment. Simplify understanding that disappointment and expectations are part of being human. Allow, accept, and embrace all the wide range of polarities in this human experience.

You’ve heard it before, “the only way through it is through it.” Accepting what is, allows what is to change.

Completion brings about closure and release. Involved patterns and parties dissolve into the past. Cultivating a conscious awareness through each cycle, we are able to recognize the heavy, shadow frequencies that inevitably show up.

Memory serves to help us in making a new choice when a similar situation returns, as they always do in life’s cycles.

Death un-becomes what life became.

— yours truly,

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Transcript

Procrastination is such an interesting topic. 

And a lot of people, we often, you know, as with many of the uncomfortable states of mind, states of being that we find ourselves in, we tend to avoid, reject, resist the experience of it. And, I tend to think about procrastination as a protective shield. It’s a place where [we] recognize that we’re safe from perceived threat of criticism, perceived threat of failure, perceived threat of death. 

I was thinking about this actually this week in particular, about completion: completion in its own way is like death. Once something is complete, it’s over. There’s no more; there’s no more…

For myself anyway, it’s very exciting to have a new project; it’s exciting to create and to come up with ideas around a process, a project, whether that’s an aesthetic or a flow of something. Process or product, it’s really exciting to think about the way that I will interact with it, how someone else will interact with it, and our connections, actually, within that interaction. Our connections not just to the thing, but to ourselves and to each other.

And I recognize for myself there’s this fear of death. This fear of it being over. Which is so funny because as a performer, you know, we constantly go to the cycle of new show; you know, all of the work of preparing, learning, memorizing, blocking, communicating… it’s a tremendous, tremendous effort that goes into telling a story. I mean, I think that could be said of pretty much anything; that a tremendous effort goes into telling a story is pretty much what we’re here doing.

And completion of tasks–the idea of completing a project, an artwork, for myself (completing a manuscript, completing a painting, completing–learning a song and completing it in performing) it’s done. The end. That will never come back again, that performance, that iteration, that life will never be again. And so I think procrastination has been a tool and a shield, for me, to protect me from death. 

I’ve been living regret, shame, doubt, disappointment, fear; which is its own kind of death. It’s its own kind of, you know, sorrowful existence. Sorrowful pitying, sorry and pitiful, perhaps even. 

One of the shifts that I felt recently is recognizing, “do not fear death, because the ‘I am,’ the eternal ‘I am’ that exists within me, carries me beyond the life of this project. Carries me through and beyond the lifetime of even this human that I’m inhabiting.” 

And to reach that level, there’s a new lightness almost in the darkness of that space. The science of “Why is outer space dark?” There’s kind of been this darkness that has been my wanting to reach into, and also afraid to. And the consciousness, the oneness, the eternal divine source that we talk about–God, that we talk about–that exists beyond. It exists within me and beyond me, and I am a part of it and it’s also is everything that I actually am. You know, so nothing–nothing does not exist, actually. Death, death is not. There is no death. 

There only, there is already only immortality. And to accept death as immortality is my view on procrastination and completion. My view now on completion: this is my immortality. This is my way to live through everything forever is to complete [things]. Because “complete” is the place of rebirth. Completion is the new beginning.