“While we are postponing, life speeds by.” –Seneca
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, who lived nearly 2,000 years ago, has been described as the most brilliant thinker and writer of his time. Like other observers throughout the ages, he saw the folly in procrastination. Most things that are postponed for no good reason today keep on being postponed and never get done. According to an old English proverb, “One of these days is none of these days.” Life, for many of us, becomes one long postponement.
I remember as a small child hearing a neighbor tell his son, “Never put off until tomorrow that which you can do today.” I gave a lot of thought to that statement and, even as a child, it made a lot of sense to me. Life imposes many demands on our time, and we never know what the demands of tomorrow will be. Thus, if we have the time today to do something that needs to be done, why postpone it until tomorrow when we may not have the time?
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “We are always getting ready to live, but never living.” We must learn to seize today, and begin living to the utmost on this day and every day that follows. To do otherwise is to squander the precious life that God has given us. And this applies to all aspects of our lives from our careers to doing good deeds for others.
Probably the two greatest reasons for procrastination are laziness and fear. Some of us feel the need to always live in a comfort zone, so if the urge to do something is a threat to our comfort, we just ignore the urge. In other words, we don’t do anything that we don’t want to do, and there are not many things that we want to do.
Fear is probably the greatest barrier to prompt action. Some of us fear failure, rejection and making the wrong decision so much that we try to avoid failure by avoiding any decision that is risky. Some of us have an extremely exaggerated notion of how bad it would be to try something and fail. We somehow imagine that if we don’t try anything, nobody will ever find out how inadequate we think we are. Unfortunately, it is difficult to be successful at anything without some risk taking, and those who experience the most success are usually those who have taken the greatest risks and experienced the most failures.
Some of us are reluctant to try to cultivate friendships because we are afraid of being hurt by rejection. And some of us are so fearful of making the wrong decision that we rarely make conscious decisions. What we don’t seem to understand is that by not making a decision we are actually making a decision. We have decided not to decide, and the repercussions of that decision may be even greater than considering all the facts and then making a conscious decision. So what good reason is there to put off until tomorrow that which we can do today?
Think about it.
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Copyright 2024
Allen W. Smith
