So here I am, sitting trying to do my taxes. It's tax season here - in fact I'm supposed to filing all my stuff in exactly 38 hrs. Instead, you are catching me blogging. I guess blogging in this moment is somehow much more interesting that doing taxes. And pondering why it's much more interesting and attractive than crunching numbers, finding receipts, filling out tedious paperwork, is even more attractive that. I can just see it now telling the revenue offices why I was late filling my return, because I spent my time starting out my sunny window pondering an interesting ponderable. Hmm... I don't think that would fly very well from those people who sit daily in tight light cubicles not really seeing the light of day for at least eight hours of it.
But hey, back to my procrasination! Or is it? Maybe I'm just avoiding something. Am I really avoiding or am I procrastinating? What is the difference? Is there really a difference? Well as I venture down my deep road of ponderability, I have to ask myself if I were really avoiding something here, what is it truly that I am avoiding, and why? It is been my experience and working as a life coach with many people who suffer from this often painful malady, that we avoid not because something may be difficult, tedious, painful, fearful, or some other adjective, but that we believe it is so. Yes, let's Get Freakin' Real! now. It's the belief behind it that is the real culprit. It's more often that intangible, sometimes elusive feeling that runs silently in the background of our inner being. So what's my elusive feeling you wonder? Well if I really dig deep here, doing taxes just feels boring, not fun. Blogging is much more fun. So I'm really avoiding the feeling of "not fun". Feelings - now there's something for a future blog. But I'm so not going there right now, because hey, that would be avoiding right? or procrastinating?
So what about that little thing called procrastination? Am I procrastinating? I would certainly say so. I'm not doing something that someone else that I have never met i.e. the taxman, says, I should be doing and have completed by a certain deadline, or else I pay the penalty police. I read somewhere that in order for behaviour to be classified as procrastination, it must be counterproductive, needless, and delaying. Hmm. Let's see, doing my taxes - needless? Certainly. But that's just my opinion. Counterproductive? Well, yes, I would say so. But that's a matter of perspective. Right now blogging is much more productive to me than doing taxes. And hey, who really in their right mind actually wants to pay tax? Delaying? Now that's where I think this falls under avoidance. If I choose to behave in a way that simply delays something else from happening which of course, I am right now, then it's simply that - a choice.
The way I see it is this. Avoiding means that I'm really skirting around the feeling or belief around what it is that I need or should be doing. Procrastinating is just the art of not doing or perhaps doing! something that I believe that needs to or should be happening but isn't. On other other hand, I could just hours and hours needlessly debating this, being counterproductive by avoiding doing my taxes which really aren't fun for me at all, and delaying the inevitable - the fact that I have to report to some faceless person sitting in a cubicle in a concrete building far far away, that I have to pay them money.
Avoidance? Procrastination? You be the judge. Because after all, I guess that's really what the difference is after all. That and ... the fact that I now have 37 hrs left. Tick ... tick ... tick ...
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