The Case For Arrival Time
There has not been a day in my entire life where I have arrived at a desk and snapped into flow the moment my bottom hits the seat. There has not been a project I have undertaken that sprung into life at the first twist of the key in the ignition. And yet it took me 31 years, five of those in self-employment, to see that this might not be some disgusting, shameful flaw in my personality, but a part of the process. Because the thing is, even though things took a while to start, they always got done. And isn’t that the main thing?
This was part a realisation and part a decision. I realised that it happened all the time, I realised that it didn’t really make a difference to output (because things always got made on time) - so I decided to embrace it. I decided that rather than feel guilty and try to beat myself into starting more quickly, I would allow this window of time to just happen, that I would just exist in it. I decided if it was going to happen whether I beat myself up or not, I might as well have mornings where I’m not berating myself.
So I decided to make it part of my process, and in so doing I realised it really was part of the process. I could feel it happening. For example, while I am not typing and am instead gazing down at my hands as I pick a loose bit of nail, I realise that my brain is perfectly composing the next paragraph. When I am staring into space I feel my brain make a bullet point list of what I need to include in whatever I was writing, and is put them into the right order.
I have redefined this early procrastination as “arrival time”. Because when have we ever sat down to work and been ready to work - particularly when that work requires the brain power and emotional capacity that creative work does? It takes time for your brain, body and emotions to converge at the point where they are ready to work, to seep through the soil of ourselves to the wellspring they can flow from. And if you think about it, the more you try to push them through, the more they are going to compound the earth and get snagged on roots and stones. In order to flow, we need to act like we’re flowing before we really are.
Here’s what we need to start asking: is there a problem here or am I just uncomfortable? There is a discomfort with arrival time, both because it is uncomfortable in and of itself as your brain grapples with this creative task, and because it’s uncomfortable to not “perform optimally” like we feel we should. But what if the things that made us uncomfortable weren’t a problem? What if the things we experience as problems-to-be-fixed are actually just uncomfortable-but-survivable-necessities?
We need to get comfortable with the uncomfortable reality that things take time when we would prefer them to be instant. It takes time to make a loaf of bread, it takes time to figure out what you want to do, it takes time to arrive at the work. It takes time for your will to do it to outweigh the discomfort of the effort it’s going to take. It takes time for your brain to wake up and digest some carbohydrate and start putting together the pieces of this puzzle. And as long as you give it this time, you may find that there isn’t actually a problem.
