The sacrifice of stalling

I have a six year old English Mastiff named Animas. She’s my best friend and a great listener. Working from home, we spend all day together. We go on two walks a day, snuggle whenever I take a break from work, and just feel safe knowing the other is at home too.

Animas is pretty smart. Not smart in a well-trained way, but smart in that she’s stubborn and manipulative. She knows when our walks are coming to an end and her energy shifts. Her doggy sense tingles and she realizes we are not on a forever walk, so she stalls. She walks slower (literally dragging her paws three feet behind me), she takes longer to investigate smells, and she rolls. She flops her 120lb. body on the ground and rolls like she’s never found a better patch of grass in her life. She rubs her nose in the grass and might casually stop for a moment with her belly up. It’s pretty adorable until flop number five in a quarter mile.

And after many words of encouragement and leash pulling, we finally make it home and she sulks for a good ten minutes.

What does stalling accomplish? It’s more than just procrastination, it’s delaying the inevitable.

We all stall. We find the easiest and least valuable things to do, while avoiding the inevitable. I’m sure all of us have been an Animas at least once or twice, if not every day of our lives, when it comes to something. Maybe you’re trying to start a business and you’re stalling the process of looking for a storefront. Or you’re an artist who’s stalling to hit Publish for the first time.

Stalling for Animas is dealing with her fear (if you’ll allow me to anthropomorphize my dog) of the walk ending. But stalling is also a fear of beginning. The start of being accountable for our hard work and effort. The start of other people seeing our work and putting a value on it.

When I brought this analogy up to my husband, he said, “Yeah, I like to stall in the beginning and then hurry up to get things done and you like to front load everything and stall at the end.”

What would happen if we stopped stalling? What would happen if Animas would stop stalling on our walks? I’d like to think she’d enjoy the final quarter mile more by not focusing so intently on the inevitable end of the walk.

And what would happen if we stopped stalling in the beginning? Would we enjoy the process more overall because we didn’t spend all our time over complicating the work? Or feeling guilty that we’re not far enough along?

It’s worth remembering what we are sacrificing (happiness, enjoyment, fulfillment), by stalling.