Three-Toed Goof-off

Ten days to Christmas. I've done nothing - no tree, no cookies, no shopping - for the holiday. I need to sweep the kitchen, too. Dust. Clean the commodes. And it's after noon already. I'll do it, I know. But in a minute.

No, I'm not sick. I'm not even that tired. I'm just lazy.

Today, I remind myself, only today. I'm dawdling. Rewarding myself with a little time off. I'm a workaholic, remember? This is not my default state.

Uh-huh. Is that what we really think? We who, as a species, will usually choose the sofa, a bowl of popcorn, and the mindless input of television over ... well, just about anything else? We have no real survival issues any more - no hunting of food, no hiding from predators, no mating imperative - but maybe because we're so "evolved" our instincts tell us we have nothing real to do. "Good times," they trill, "safe times." That triggers the impulse to store up against dangerous days ahead. Except there aren't any. And the more leisure time we have, the more we crave, and - suddenly - we find ourselves spiraling into a place of procrastination, obesity, and decay with a blank space in our brains where how-we-got-here should be. But we think just because we're not lazy everywhere, we're not lazy anywhere.

Sad thing is, it's mostly habit, and habit comes from environment as well as temperment. When Head Trip was a baby, and I was pregnant with Acid Trip, the Big Lug and I were on our way to the new duty station when we stopped in our home town. We were slated to spend two nights with my father, who had moved into a small house with the family dog after the divorce with my mom. I walked in with both arms and belly full of baby, and looked around - open area with kitchen and living room all together, gray carpet, not much for the baby to hurt herself with. Good. Needed a vacuuming (dogs shed), but I could do that. Dad left to work, and I took out the ancient canister vac.

Wait, you interrupt your preaching and philosophizing to tattle on Dad? How is this relevant to the current discussion? You just want to flaunt how far you've come, you -

Anyway, it didn't work. Not a hair moved. I tripped the latch on the vac, and - poomph! - the thing popped like a confetti balloon, spraying fur and dust everywhere. I couldn't find a new bag, so I cleared it by hand (gross!) and started again. It worked. The gray hair left the gray carpet and revealed ... cerulean blue beneath it. Seriously, in wide, nozzle-sized swaths. Blue.

Get off your high horse - it was actually kind of funny, and so him. It's not as if I didn't always know he wasn't the cleanest knot on the tree, especially after they split - remember the mummified frog in the spider web behind the toilet that weekend home from college? I hardly aspired to that. Besides, it was just post-divorce blues, right?

Oh, sure, there were reasons; there always are. Stress, thwarted lust or envy (I curled into a ball for awhile after that bookcase), a lull in the storm between what-a-week and crap-look-what's-ahead (lately), even too much sugar in our diets. This particular Deadly has so many causes ... and we have so many excuses for it ... that unless it's out of control or overly inconvenient, we don't seem to care. In fact, by sloth's very nature we almost can't care. We let inertia take over, and it's not until we're hooked up to an EKG watching our heart bob and weave its way toward a flatline that we start to pay attention.

Stop being such a drama queen. It takes a lot of energy to balance my emotions during this crazy time of life, and it has to be my priority or I might end up with divorce, too (or a prison sentence). I have a list of "must dos" as long as my arm, all the time, so something has to go - I jettison the things I don't like to do first. Okay, maybe for too many days once in awhile ... weeks ... but it's so easy to rationalize leaving the work, I ... no, I'm not lazy, seriously - I just need a reason to do the task, that's all.

So find one - duty, routine, money, or because it's the right thing to do - and then get up and do the work. This Deadly isn't just a sin, it's one that can kill us. And not just our bodies or our crumbling homes - this one kills our souls. All we need is get up and move.

Ugh. Fine. Then what?

Then you'll move more because you'll want to move more. We can get into good habits, too, you know. Eating sugar makes us want to eat more sugar, but eating vegetables makes us crave vegies. Wearing a size 24 is easy (so stretchy) but sliding into a 14 (seriously) has made me want to keep wearing a 14 ... or even a 12. And I'm thinking I could get totally hooked on a clutter-free home or a growing pile of manuscript pages. Yes, we need breaks, but it's about balance, and the easiest way to get it is just to start, then take another step, and another. The more results I see, the more gratification (good kind) I get, the more I want. Our minds, and our bodies, are strange like that.

I've noticed, and I do get it - all we want to inherit from Dad is the moralizing bit, right? Which means I hate you and ... sigh ... I guess we have a house to clean, huh?

Yep. And, uh, apparently not just the one with four walls.