An Inconvenient Truth

I took my car yesterday because I was vain. And then I felt guilty about it.

I'm pretty much a world champion when it comes to guilt. Don't know whether it's Mennonite guilt, liberal guilt, first-child-syndrome guilt, or just a heightened sense of hubris that leads to me assuming I'm actually responsible for everything untoward that happens (and, therefore, must feel guilty about it) or what, but "guilty until proven innocent" is my personal mantra and exculpatory evidence is rare.

So, having made myself late because I just had to blow dry my hair yesterday morning and thus missed the "make it to the bus" window, I jumped in my car and felt convicted that I had greeted Mother Earth with solitary-driver-diesel-fumes so punishingly and so very early in the morning, all because of my vanity. (My hair is very pretty right now, though, after last week's hair appointment.)

But then I thought, you know, I knew this would be a possibility back when I decided to forego my sleeping-on-wet-hair + next-day-bedhead look the night before. No, this was not (only) vanity that led to that little hole in the ozone layer with my name on it. It was another of the seven deadlies.

Sloth.

In addition to feeling guilty, I am also a world champion when it comes to being lazy. I procrastinate everything, and complete only that which comes with a deadline. The house is littered with unfinished projects (the baby blanket sans binding started when The Girl was three, my read-the-Bible-in-a-year bookmark stuck in Numbers, the Yoga Boot Camp box that has been opened only long enough for me to realize I don't like the look of the instructor).

And so, it shouldn't be surprising that I chose sleep instead of a few extra minutes to shinify my coiffure, thus leading to the infamous car debacle.

Part of me wants to blame technological advancements for my embracing of that internal inertia by which my body at rest will remain there. I live in a Jetsons world of washing machines, dishwashers, e-commerce and e-mail. Perhaps, I reason, the world is to blame for requiring less of me, leading me to require less of myself.

But that's silly, I know. If I were Laura Ingalls Wilder, I would have let the dishes pile up until we were out of clean dishes, instead of tidying up after each meal. If I were Lady Macbeth, I would have said, "ah, let him keep his crown. It's too much work to kill him." If I were Lot's wife, I'd have died in the flames instead of turning into a pillar of salt because I probably would have put off packing until it was too late.

No, I must face the truth. I am lazy because I do not like to do that which is inconvenient to me (i.e. pretty much everything of value).

And it's not that this laziness produces any benefit. Everything I procrastinate I ultimately have to do anyway, with the added bonus of less time and more cranky. Why is that? Why punish myself continually with guilt-inducing sloth only to have to play catch-up at the eleventh hour?

Samuel Johnson, great moralist that he was, wrote a piece on procrastination:

Thus life is languished away in the gloom of anxiety, and consumed in collecting resolution which the next morning dissipates; in forming purposes which we scarcely hope to keep, and reconciling ourselves to our own cowardice by excuses, which, while we admit them, we know to be absurd. Our firmness is by the continual contemplation of misery hourly impaired; every submission to our fear enlarges its dominion; we not only waste that time in which the evil we dread might have been suffered and surmounted, but even where procrastination produces no absolute encrease of our difficulties, make them less superable to ourselves by habitual terrors. (Rambler 134)

And yet, the story goes, Johnson himself wrote the article at the last minute, while the messenger boy sent to collect his submission waited in the hall.

At least I'm in good company. And now I should go fold some laundry. But I suspect I'll just spend my time surfing instead.