Inner  Frontier
Fourth Way Spiritual Practice

 

Inner Work


For the week of September 5, 2005


Procrastination

Because a part of our nature touches the eternal, we mistakenly transfer that sense of timelessness to our attitude toward time itself. We live with an unarticulated and unexamined assumption that our days will never end. But clearly they shall. Meanwhile, by ascribing the nature of eternity to time, we all too readily fall into the trap of procrastination.

We put off the difficult and distasteful but necessary in favor of the easy and frivolous. We neglect the more important and long term in favor of the less important but more immediate. In that way the big goals, the larger accomplishments that require unlimited commitment, elude us. We kill time by frittering it away and, in so doing, we kill a part of our life. The voice of laziness, shirking, and procrastination is the voice of time, triviality and death. The voice that speaks of depth, love, and action is the voice of life, eternity and will.

When it comes to the inner action of the spiritual path, the problem of procrastination multiplies. Any minor entertainment or irritation and we dive off our base in presence, figuring we can work at presence later. But that later future is imaginary because it lacks the force of our will to create it. When we slip out of presence, we never look back. Our attention and interest flow toward the distraction. We put off our inner work and impoverish our life in the process.

The only time we can practice presence is now. Procrastination eviscerates our inner life. But by seeing this clearly and by keeping our true priorities close to the surface of our mind and heart, we can ignore the subtle, seductive call of inner laziness, and work to be and to do.

For this week, notice how procrastination operates in your life and act despite it.


     

About Inner Frontier                                    Send us email 

Copyright © 2001-2024 Joseph Naft. All rights reserved.