In my beloved partner, a highly articulate intellectual with a flair for putting things off in the most creative manner, I am able to observe and reflect on the nature of procrastination.

Recently hired as a First Officer by a local airline, my darling has been thrown into an intense period of necessary mental and logistical preparations. In the forefront is the need to review and familiarize herself with hundreds of pages of Standard Operation Procedures (or "SOPs", as these necessary but somewhat dry bits of information are referred to by people in the industry).

I knew we were in trouble when, ten days prior to the start of ground school, I observed my beloved voraciously reading not the SOPs, but rather, various online bulletin boards dealing with which airline is best to work for, how to study said SOPs and what supplementary resources on Amazon are helpful when starting a new ground school class. 

Tats is very effective, you see, at convincing herself and those around her that in order to study well, she must first take the time necessary to prepare for the preparation of preparing her notes for review. I was almost convinced myself the first few times I saw her engage in this sort of behaviour. 

Seven years of co-habitation with this creature has taught me to be a better bullshit detector.

Things culminated in a new level of crazy this weekend when -- in an attempt to escape her thick cloud of impending new job anxiety -- I retreated under a blanket on the couch, noise-canceling headphones applied to my head, and Mozart's clarinet concerto flowing melodiously into my ears.  Halfway through the first movement, I heard a sort of crunching sound emanating from somewhere outside the concerto.

So much for noise canceling!

I attempted to ignore the distraction and focus on the clarinet... alas, by the time we were a short way into the Adagio, I tore off my not-so-noise-canceling headphones to see what the infernal racket was coming from my beloved's desk nearby.

The answer unveiled a new stage of procrastination: Tats had printed out all three million pages of her new airline's SOPs on our ancient and slowly dying printer, supplementing the barely-legible pale ink with quite possibly the tiniest font size she could find ("cute, little SOPS are comforting", she explained when I raised my eyebrows quizzically), and was rhythmically cutting the pages into quarters to make little booklets to study in chunks.

Apparently unperturbed that -- a week before ground school -- she was still physically manipulating the SOPs rather than committing them to memory, her greatest concern at this point was how she could effectively and attractively bind her mini SOP booklet.

​I decided to make some tea.  It seemed the only possible way forward.

Several hours later, those of you who fly commercially will be relieved to know that this airline's newest pilot is now an eighth of the way through her cute little SOP booklet, and is taking only periodic breaks to consult aviation forums regarding working conditions for the competitor, and is even looking up some actual aviation terms and definitions.

Blue skies ahead!

While I pressed the various buttons on the machine, the near-lurker kept remarking incredulously about how everything was closed today.  

"Even you can't get a bottle of wine!", he exclaimed, clearly perplexed.

I mumbled something about the obvious; it was, after all, Easter Sunday, so naturally everything was going to be closed.

"Even the banks are all closed!"

"Well, yes..." I said again, done with my own banking now, and slightly annoyed at this person's sheer stupidity.  "It's Easter Sunday.  Everything is closed.  It's Easter!"

"Everything?" came the fellow's response, in a dubious tone, as though he simply could not believe that a bottle of wine was not to be gotten this day. "Banks, too?"

Next he wanted to know if I could help him use the bank machine; he'd hitherto always done his banking in person. 

After ascertaining that he knew his PIN, I obliged.  He wanted to withdraw $100; we managed to extract $20, his balance being exactly $33.47.  He marveled at how easy it was (the machine even knew his name!), thanked me for my assistance, and we parted ways.

As I walked the dog along the lake and back to our home, I pondered what had just transpired.  I considered that -- incredible as it was to me that someone could not know that of course everything would be closed on Easter Sunday -- perhaps it was just as inconceivable to someone that a day could exist when every shop was closed, even the basics (hehe) like liquor stores and banks!

As my girlfriend reminded me, when I later recounted the tale, she herself had been in Canada many years, and not until she met me did she truly have an understanding of and remember that there were significant days in our religious and cultural calendars that indeed businesses shut down completely.  While some of us prepare for weeks on end for these days of celebration and remembrance, others just happen to focus on other priorities in their daily, weekly and annual cycles.  Different priorities, perhaps, but, equally important, and certainly no less valuable by sole virtue of their difference.

When we make assumptions about other people's understanding of the world and hurry to judge interpretations that differ from our own, we expose our bias, and worse, our ignorance, that the world is not one way to all people.  And in so doing, we miss all the bits and pieces the world and its diverse people have to offer.

I am appalled at the mediocrity of my writing.  Once inspired, and at times even funny, my blog posts have become average at best, mundane in actuality.

Even the quagmire of mediocrity through which they wade is a sham, the tired if apt phrase stolen from other writers, me being too uninspired to craft my own unique insult with which to describe my miserable work of late!

Why, tho?

It used to be the case, when I was swamped with students and the endless marking, lesson planning and social problem solving that accompanied them, that I felt constantly inspired.  Exhausted, yet excited about my work, I was frequently eager and somehow found the time and energy to share my various classroom experiments. 

The world before and after school also seemed more blog-worthy, somehow, and the words found themselves more readily in my mind, and worked their way more effortlessly onto the keyboard where they danced together to form ideas reasonably worth crafting so that others, too, could be inspired while reading.

Whereas I used to easily spin out a blog post several times a week, I am hard pressed now to find the time or inclination to write and post something more than once a month at best.

Is it because I am no longer a classroom teacher, then, that I feel a loss of material worth writing about?  How so?  The world has not changed so much as my place in it... surely even if I feel my contributions are less directly valuable than they once were, there is still inspiration to be found in the world outside of work...?

Or has the world changed, and is that the cause of my inertia? 

One thing I have noticed is the sheer abundance that colleagues and strangers produce: Before the age of twitter, instagram and facebook, before snapchat was ubiquitous, before in order for something to count, it had to have three hashtags and at least 250 likes, before followers were virtual and strangers were "friends", back at the dawn of the internet, when I was one of the few teachers in this country who had a blog, and by the very virtue of its existence, I was considered tech savvy (ha, ha, ha!) and my colleagues and students thought I was famous (tee hee), it was easy to get motivated to write.  Without competition, I felt the urge to get out there and self-publish!  Teachers needed me!  My dashboard showed they were searching critically important key words on my blog, and I had so much more to tell them about those themes and ideas!

But now, now there are a hundred thousand plus people who can say it better, with greater clarity, and with more awesome photos than I can. 

It seems as though every educator has a blog, a TPT acct and a social media following that rivals the Kardashians.  What can I say that hasn't already been said, and with greater eloquence and more recency?  And not just about teaching -- so what if I went to Cuba and spent two days off-resort with my kids?  A gazillion other travelers have beat me to it, and described it with breathtaking verbal imagery and panache. My recently-begun Salsa class is also nothing to blog about -- unless people are interested in a blog post about two left feet.  (And even that has been done and overdone.) So what if I periodically fly airplanes? #girlswhofly has 12 656 posts on IG. Even #queerparenting has over 1000, and I can tell by the pics that those parents are better looking, healthier, cooler and happier, and that their kids are all way more well-adjusted than ours!!!

It feels like I have nothing to offer the world, and that everyone out there on the internetz has me beat in every category.

My kids are becoming teenagers, but I'm the one suffering the adolescent existential crisis!

The superfluous content with which the world seems virtually stuffed, and the speed with which the it produces said content, is overwhelming.  To be honest, the pace at which I feel called to keep moving makes me question my ability to discern quality and authenticity in any form of content -- mine or others!  And I find myself not only lacking the inspiration to write, but often also the mental and emotional energy to participate at all.

If I stop to think about it, I have to wonder whether my writing, once a hallmark of my skill and imagination, has been replaced with other forms of creativity. Perhaps my ability to orchestrate six people's summer plans harmoniously across two or three households, or to coordinate a group of educators and policy makers by leading from behind is less public and glamorous than a well written blog post once a week but equally impressive and important.

But I sure would like a way to continue to develop these new skills while simultaneously growing as a writer. 

Perhaps a mindfulness exercise I will endeavor to undertake will be to notice small things worth writing about, and then to capture them in a few words.  Longer than a tweet, but shorter than the diatribes I used to write. A focused lens, an appetizer rather than a meal, a verbal salad.

Stay tuned.