Old Moon

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Get Up and Go...?

The older I get, and to to quote Wallace Stegner, "...and I get pretty old...," the more I find myself giving in to lethargy, or inertia, or whatever it is that prevents people from doing immediately whatever it is they should. Everything from the laundry to balancing the checkbook to transplanting the overcrowded perennials, all the way to sitting down to write the promised review or react to the nagging mosquito hum of a nascent poem--everything falls into this sticky trap. I don't get distracted. No excuse there. I simply don't want to do it, and so for a time, I don't. There's a tiny voice at the back of my head saying I've earned laziness at my age, or that the world won't come to an end if I procrastinate, and other equally solipsistic bait.

The irony is that I have this sense of time racing away, as the astrophysicists tell us it does, at an ever more rapid speed. What I don't get is why that knowledge alone can't blast me off my rooted spot.  This is being posted here in the vague hope that someone (over the age of 45) will have a suggestion to boot us slugs into motion--metaphorically, of course!

1 comment:

Glenda Beall said...

I wish I knew the answer. My lack of motivation goes back for many years, and I have never understood why I don't do the things I really want to do.
Today, I blame my lethargy on one thing or the other, but deep inside, I have always told myself it is just a flaw in my character. Now that I hear others are like me, I guess it isn't.