There’s always tomorrow… Your future is a wonderful place — it’s where you keep all your great ideas and big dreams. The only problem is that tomorrow is not today, and today is where everything happens.
Dreams are wonderful things to have around. But, when you consider all the work involved in realizing them, dreams can be daunting.
So you retreat a step — back to the fantasy, the brainstorm, the anticipation, back to the fun part...
You already have the Big Idea, and you can see the dream of your having reached the finish line, reaping the benefits of the follow-through… You can see the necessary action steps laid out before you — it’s a long hard road, but you can see where it leads.
So why do you stop, and not begin immediately taking the steps to get there? Why do you come back again and again to this beautiful view of your goal and yet decide, each and every time, to put off beginning the work?
Is it because you’re lazy? Maybe you don’t have it in you to do the work. Or maybe it’s not such a great idea, after all, and you’d rather not face that fact.
Maybe you fear success, because your success will have repercussions.
Maybe you’re just preserving the dream. Maybe you’re protecting that gorgeous view of your horizon, forever filled with possibility.
You love having a future where your dreams come true.
Admiring your pretty future is a promise. That promise doesn’t change the present, but it makes the difficulty of Now more bearable.
If you achieve your dream — if you arrive at your goal — if you successfully bring the future into the present — then to some degree, even if you do make it happen, and you’re wildly successful, you have destroyed that vision of the future.
It’s not out there anymore, whispering to you of a better life, someday — it becomes real, it starts happening. The future is changed.
By keeping a dream alive in the future, you are protecting hope. You love that potential, and you don’t want to see the end of that gorgeous Tomorrow — you need it.
Procrastination is not your enemy, after all. Procrastination is not your fear of doing the work, your fear of failing, your fear of not finding your way, or your fear of discovering that your big idea wasn’t as Big as you thought.
Procrastination is not an evil, self-defeating force that plans to undermine your goals and to make sure you never make it happen, fueled by his secret knowledge of how much you suck and don’t really have it in you.
Procrastination preserves your dream. Procrastination works for you — he’s entirely on your side — fiercely defending your bright future. Procrastination loyally guards the idea you hold most dear. Procrastination keeps it on that pedestal — pristine, full of hope and promise.
Procrastination is the guardian of your future. And maybe he’s doing exactly what you asked him to do…
Image credit Paola Kizette Cimenti via Creative Commons on Flickr