The Procrastination Chronicles : Reading Walden
On the path to greatness, there will be 100 overcomings.
I will chronicle my attempts to overcome procrastination. My technique is to start small, really small.
My favorite post in the series is Dealing with a Bunch of Crap.
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I think I now have a process for reading books I have been putting off: skip ahead and read various parts until something captures my attention.
This gets over one of the great principles of procrastination: the inertia of it. When I start at a book a few times, every time I don’t get past the current page sets up more resistance to ever getting off that page. It emphatically does not help when I have good reasons to read the book. Such was the case when I had trouble reading Walden. Thoreau is to American nature writing as Socrates is to western philosophy. It was embarrassing that I had not read Walden. Embarrassing! If that was not enough, one of the only people who actually read my blog, the best man at my wedding, is a big fan of the book, so I should have read it. But still, each time I abandoned the first step of the project — read page 1 — I developed more and more mental resistance to reading it.
I even knew what my problem with the first page of Walden had always been: it just came off sanctimonious. Now I realize that wasn’t Thoreau’s fault. When reading it, I kept having the intrusion of all the criticisms of Thoreau I had heard . . . from people who may or may not have read him. The gen-X and/or post-modern cynicism against all white male writers is real. I had been set up to look for reasons to knock Thoreau down a peg.
But one day I started to skip paragraphs and more of scan around, until I ran into a charming mediation on heat, life and how much shelter and clothes we really need. Here’s a bit of it to give you the flavor:
Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the same second nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not cookery properly be said to begin?
Read the whole thing for yourself. It’s free.
I fell in love with this passage and then had no trouble with enjoying Walden and making Thoreau a friend of mine.
A book is usually deemed a classic for a reason, so give it more than one chance to show you its value. Skip around to see if you can find something of value to latch on to.
Thoreau is now one of my favorite authors. Over the course of my life, I may end up reading everything he wrote, including looking into purchasing a copy of his journals. This just goes to show that you, dear reader, you may very well be procrastinating something that may profoundly change your life.
I was.
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