The Sonikcycle Syndicate

I started working on my doctoral dissertation the moment I decided to officially Pile it High & Deep under the auspices of UVa, though for the first 2.5 years this work was merely a contemplation of the vague inklings of what was to be. It wasn’t until January ‘07 that I began writing my dissertation in earnest. And it wasn’t until July ‘07 that I fully realized the subtle nuances and powerful effects of procrastination, and the nature of my own dilatoriness.

That procrastination is real, I do not question. But is it always real? Is it possible that what looks like dog shit, smells like dog shit, and tastes like dog shit, ain’t really dog shit? In a word, yes. I won’t ramble on about the psychology of the Big P, but I will share a serendipitous event that gave evidence for cosmic preordination operating under the cloak of imagined procrastination. Here goes…

Weeks and weeks had passed and it seemed as though the only things I had to show for my doctoral self was a respectable Chapter 1, a detailed outline for Chapters 2 & 3, and a boatload of articles and books that I had to digest. More time passed and the emotional roller coaster of disserprocrastitating manifested in manic swings between self-loathing, jubilation, and a devil-may-care-flee-to-the-other-side-of-the-planet attitude. One day, I was chatting with a friend and colleague and he mentioned an author with whom I was not familiar, and, as it turns out, whose work was critical to my dissertation and exactly what I needed to bring closure to my lit review. Here’s the punch: for weeks I felt that I was a pained victim of procrastination, and while some of that P was real, some was only imagined because there was nothing I could’ve known or done to make that conversation happen any sooner. That was the time when I was meant to get it together.

The moral of this story is that procrastination ain’t always what it seems, so don’t let it get to you, and just let the chips fall where they may because things happen when they are meant to happen.

Technorati Tags: dissertation, procrastination, kairos

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Wood. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.