The New Statesman quotes this aphorism: procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
What is procrastination, though? Is sitting in bed for an hour with boiled eggs, watching the snow and reading a novel (but Sarah Waters‘s The Night Watch was sooo goooood!), or the papers – is that procrastination? Is getting home at 3am and then sitting up till 4 in a furry hat, feet tucked into a sleeping bag, watching Mad Men on iPlayer – is that procrastination?
Last week I was talking to musician and playwright Suzy Almond, who I came across at last year’s Devoted and Disgruntled. She remarked that open space seemed so ramshackle and disorganised (the way you’d walk away and leave topics unfinished, the way you’d drift around … )and yet it was so productive. I wouldn’t have made any of the theatre I made last year if I hadn’t been there – it made me feel that things didn’t have to be perfect to move forwards. I suppose the musicians I’ve been working with do things in the same way: I like to plan ahead; they send texts a day before.
Now I’m making plans and Arts Council application – level – of – detail schemes. I’m naturally someone who likes to plan. But I wonder, sometimes, whether I give myself a hard time about the drifting, and the Mad Men, and that sometimes it might be just as creative to go slow, go like the snow, drifting, this way and that, in sprials, landing eventually.
Sounds like you’ve got the balance (between planning and drifting) just right to me –
“If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim….”