Procrastination

If you tend to procrastinate, worry not about this article. Normandy Alden's piece on procrastination get's right to point and will take you as little time to read as a few Facebook status messages. Normandy offers a useful reflection on what happens in our minds as we procrastinate and she also invites further discussion and reflection from her readers. Please share your experiences in the comment lines. -Editor

“I’ll have more time tomorrow. Besides, I have some phone calls to make… and I’ve got to run to the store before the weekend. Maybe the right snack would help me focus. Okay, Fig Newton’s were not the right snack, maybe a piece of cheese? I wonder what the weather will be like this week? Checking Facebook….”

These and similar thoughts have been the creation of my procrastinating mind. I have been procrastinating about writing this article for over a month, in fact. Originally, my idea was to write about the impact my yoga practice has had on my spiritual life. Once I realized that I had been procrastinating about the article because I didn’t really want to write on that topic at all, I decided that perhaps a more apt topic for me would be “Dealing with Procrastination”! What has finally brought me to the keyboard was the idea that I could apply spiritual tools to a very mundane, frustrating issue.

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Practice

Normandy is a ceramic artist and she shares her love and insight found in working with clay. She delights in the spiritual discipline of committing to the task in her hands. She offers some photos as proof.

Clay is such a responsive material. Each choice and touch is in some way evident in the finished vessel, from its infancy as a mound of wet clay in my hand, to the finished vessel: glazed, fired, and functioning in the world. The process of making ceramic vessels by hand is rich in metaphors for ourselves and spiritual lives. Even the words potters use to describe a pot relates to our bodies: lip, foot, handle. The vessels of our lives are filled with our desires, relationships and beliefs as surely as the mug in my hand is filled with coffee. With all things, form follows function.

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