PROCRASTINATION, FEAR, and WORRY

Procrastination can be helpful.

Being a procrastinator has its advantages, and in case of this project, it gave me time to think. This little endeavor of explaining a simple child’s game could be used in more than one way. I could just explain the game as played during my childhood but the phrase “he’s lost his marbles” kept haunting me. How many useful (more or less) bits of information have been lost over the centuries in passing teachings from life experience and parents onto our progeny. If we were to look at these things as something to collect and pass on rather than just using and discarding, we might save our family some time and trouble.  Looking back on one’s life is so much more accurate than trying to force our tomorrows and the reason is simple, we can see the cause in relationship to the effects.  I have been a procrastinator for quite a bit of my life and the main reason is probably fear.  However, don’t take that as just one fear, because there is generally more than one that can put us into a state of inaction.  The subject in this segment is not cause but putting procrastination to good use and keeping it under control.

Procrastination is useful if you really have no idea of how to handle a situation or problem, and in those instances you put off acting until you can get good counsel on how to correctly take care of the solution.  The thing here is to act on asking and not being afraid to ask for help.

   Fear and Worry major components of procrastination, and it has reactions that are basic to our being animal or human nature, fight, flight or freeze. The most commonly recognized is that of fight or flight and those two are the most acceptable. The one that causes procrastination is the instinctive protection mechanism of freezing all motion to become hidden in plain sight.  

 Procrastination is also used as a way of dealing with things we consider to be dangerous to our life patterns, so we worry and fret about all the things we are simply just imagining.  Looking back on life again it’s very evident that most of the things we spend worrying about never come to pass in the end.  If we use our procrastination as a tool for sorting out what is a real concern, versus imaginary demons, it becomes a positive means of dealing with  

 Worry is probably the biggest waste of time, and cause of mental problems of the human condition.  The idea that if you don’t worry you don’t care what happens is a ruse.  The secret is not to worry about a situation but to find an answer for dealing with it and then do it.  Worry saps your mental and emotional power, until there is no thought except the worry.

What has happened to unity

Our nation is facing one of its most critical junctures since the Civil War period.  We have distinct attitudinal differences about the direction our country should be heading.  We have a portion of our society that believes our past history shows us as an evil entity, as a country built upon periods of time that we need not, nor can we, look upon them with any semblance of pride.   We have a choice between groveling in the muck of the past or being led out of the mire by visions of greatness made possible by honest dissertation of the good inherent in our people.

The last few decades have shown our country changing direction in to a place that is preventing us from achieving a positive outcome.  We see the failure of so many facets in our society, government, education and financial.  Instead of leaders who seek real solutions through honest study of root cause we find those who give lip service to political expediency.  We have not seen any Washington’s, Jefferson’s, or Lincolns who have the leadership quality of conviction and the inner fire to make us rise as one to answer the challenge.  Replacing the unity of our greatest days is a great fragmentation into groups seeking not the greater good but rather the greed of what’s in it for me.  The ethics of the past have eroded.  A growing proportion of our society no longer looks at their position in life as a matter of self-actualization but as a result of someone or something outside of their realm of responsibility. 

Racial Anger 2011

Focus on the ills of our society through the prism of anger, payback and get even, cannot change the past or fill the need to achieve greatness.  Our country is in need of cohesiveness and what we have is divisiveness.  

My viewpoints on life have always been colored by the educational lens of Sociology and Psychology.  My belief that a society is merely an oversized persona made up of individual beliefs and attitudes in constant flux, seems truer as my time goes by.  Today’s American society is similar to an individual with a slow acting virus in which the illness (although progressing slowly at first) gains its dominance in the body.  Eventually without adequate treatment the body is prone to weakness and eventually death.  Today our society is infected with anger, hatred, selfishness, greed and idolatry.  Most feel that they deserve more than they have, feel anger toward those that have more, feel hatred toward those whose ancestors did their ancestors wrong, and their form of idolatry is whatever ideology to which they adhere.

Those who migrated to our nation originally, (other than those who were indigenous), came because of a need for religious freedom, they worked hard and suffered to achieve a better state of life for their children.  They achieved this not through hatred, but through a strong sense of hope, faith and a belief that things could be better if an effort were made.  

Mistakes were made in the course of our country’s advance in its place in World History.  Those mistakes were generally a result of the same failures that we as individuals make.  Fear, hatred and greed caused the genocide of the indigenous people (although not completely) greed and a need for cheap labor brought the sad practice of slavery.  It was bad enough that those sicknesses invaded our national soul at that time, but to let those things take away from the healing process is as large a crime. 

Good bye to Whitney Houstan

Today marked the end of a tragedy, the final passing of one of Gods true gifts to humanity.  A voice that was born and nurtured in the choir of a church in New Jersey, a spirit that touched all that heard her voice or saw her smile.  Whitney may have stopped breathing a few short days ago, but she was killed years earlier by one of the great lies of our time.  Like Eve, tempted by satan, Whitney was stolen from humanity by a lie, and her joy in life was replaced by that lie. I disagree with the statement regarding why flags fly at half-mast.  It should not be reserved only for those in military or in government.  Whitney touched the lives of millions of people worldwide as an example on both ends of the continuum, good and bad.  She had an ability to touch the human soul, through her voice we were able to imagine the heights to which the human spirit could climb and through her addiction we saw how fragile the human condition truly is.  Whitney will be greatly missed but in our lifetime one of Gods brightest lights shown itself so briefly.  In her both God and Satan made themselves visible.

Keep trying to get on track,

my own meandering holds me back

Confusion reigns and wastes my time

So many projects racing through my mind

Words, notes, ideas for songs litter the stack

While I let distractions cause creativity to lack

Looking back at time at all I've seen pass

It seems mental agility cannot excel

With your head placed firmly

Up your Donkey

another conversation with God

                     ‘Lord sometimes laying in bed at night so many thoughts and questions come into my mind.  Many time they are real puzzlers so I got this idea that if I prayed about them, categorized them and actually asked them it might help me get to sleep.  There are questions about my life the way I think, the way I do or don’t accomplish tasks.  Why I feel the way I do about some things and why ” I  DON’T FEEL WHEN I REALLY DO .  S0 much of this seems to make  no more sense.  It was a good thought but as far as helping me get a good night’s sleep it was a dismal failure.

              You have proven your existence to me in so many personal ways and disproven yourself in as many or more.  You did in omniscience know that we all have portions of St. Thomas in our makeup and without faith we would be left with nothing more than doubt, superstition or the emptiness of nothing.  Fortunately for me I am able to muddle along in my form of belief which I use as one of the blocks to build my life building on.  It’s quite a unique process actually using rock, ruble, glass, gems and coal from all the untold possibilities as to why we are here on this planet at this time and with all the other people, animals, Bird, fish and fauna that we are surrounded with. 

I often wonder when speaking to some of my friends why they think the things they think about You Lord.  Some think you are evil, discriminatory, and unable to be pleased kind of an off with their heads type of universal tyrannical ruler of the universe but with the experiences afforded to me I don’t see the angry tyrannical God others perceive.  There always seems to be a gift hidden in the experience.  The good thing about being given a longer life is that going through trials and learning experiences are more easily recognized for what they truly are.  You teaching , and Satan trying to interrupt the class.  You build and he tears down.  Do the paths you send us down all have the same outcomes and purpose.  Why does it seem that you put your weakest prodigals back into the fight with minds filled to the brim with the sickness of so many sins to remember, with no pride of past with which to battle the onslaught of spiritual failures and our inability to stand firmly as we crawl out of the slimy pits of sin we live or lived in.