Can you get to the right place at the right time — some other time? I wanted to write this essay a month back. I didn’t do it because I can undisputably, not uncommonly point to the fact that some other things came up.
Procrastination is a pathological condition of productivity. Its symptoms are as mild as putting off this essay by a month – to as severe as not calling your mum for a year – to as hopeless as not signing up for those dance lessons, for ten years now. All because things came up. Or as my generation likes to say, because, like, I don’t know: life happened.
Actually, accurately, death happened.
Life has never happened to most of us. We postponed it from happening because allow me to blow your mind: we wanted something else to happen sometime else. We put off important things not because we don’t know their importance, but because we have reserved all our wishes for the flicker that is the future. Procrastination is the hope of an afterlife.
Our unquestioning, unshattering belief in the future is what’s been happening to us all along. What we mistake for hope is a mistaken, maddening myth that the best of your life can happen only in the future. This is what manifests as regret. And regrets are procrastination on steroids — accumulating on you in all the wrong places at all the wrong times, now.
Everything people call, give me a minute to throw up — life transformation — is only your becoming aware of everything you have been putting off. Everything you can be while becoming something, you are not. Something un-life-like.
With life transformations, nothing really transformed around you. All that life-transforming shit was always inside you. But the right time and right place was always in the future and depended on someone screaming into your face. Half of life-transformation is the comforting knowledge that something can still change. The other half is the realization that you are going to die soon and are too weak to dance and that, you can cry now if you wish, life hasn’t happened at all.
Every time I travel, I think about the vagabond version of fermi’s paradox: where is everyone going? Everyone’s in an existentially drawn-out hurry. And I have been in a hurry each time I have had that realization. That’s why life-transformations are popular around here.
Just the other day, some guy on a horse was watching me struggle to get my bike between a couple of trucks so I could get inches ahead. I knew he was watching me because, like I said, he was on a horse dangit. I looked up at the guy – and he smiled at me. My life transformed. At least I have since then been questioning this phony hurry. Slowing down.
I even got myself a horse.
Okay. Not really.
As promised, allow me to take a shot at transforming your life, for a small fee, right now:
Ask yourself what you’ve been putting off and go do it.
That’s all. We are done. I’d been putting off writing an essay for a month now. Today I sat my horse arse down and wrote. Sometimes it is as simple as that. There are always things you are putting off and that thing is going to find you, haunt you and leave you wondering if you lived at all.
But now that I have transformed your life, you don’t have to worry about that. So, I hope you send me the money you owe me. I hope you tell people how much you love them. Okay, that’s too many vomit bags to gather. I hope you partake in the miracle that is being there for people. I hope you travel. I hope you tell your boss to screw off, as regularly as you can. I hope you join those dance classes and make a complete fool of yourself.
I hope you happen to life.
Meditations 