Hitting the Snooze Button on My Life
Posted on | February 6, 2010 | No Comments
I’m a big a fan of my snooze button. We’re buddies, the button and me. We understand each other. It doesn’t mind that I relentlessly pound it every morning without fail and, in return, it gives me nine more blissful minutes of “sleep.” (I have no idea why it’s nine minutes and not five or ten. I suppose I could fix it and set it to something else, but me and the nine-minute button, we’ve bonded.)
When I was writing my own version of the state of my union earlier this week, however, I kept thinking about how I tend to hit the snooze button on my life. I have this tendency to put things off and save them for another time. I keep thinking I have all the time in the world until, inevitably, months go by and I suddenly wonder why I haven’t accomplished more.
I don’t think I’m lazy, though at times I certainly can be. I think it has more to do with my utter and profound loathing of change. (And if that’s not a statement Freud could love, I don’t know what is.)
It’s silly, of course. As I’ve mentioned before, change will happen whether I want it to or not. Change is a constant and though we’re not always conscious of it, it happens all the time. But my snooze button reflex isn’t necessarily about a love for the status quo; rather, it’s an unrecognized fear of the great unknown.
Change is hard. Changing means venturing beyond your comfort zone and doing the very things that scare the bejeebus out of you. Change means not knowing what will happen, but doing it anyway. It’s like a giant, vast black hole and there’s not always going to be a light at the end of the tunnel (random side note: don’t you just love how I’m mixing and matching metaphors!)
When faced with the choice between the great unknown and the comfort and familiarity of keeping things the same, it’s all too easy to hit the metaphorical snooze button and put it off until later. In spite of my best efforts, though, I can’t keep saving things for “later” because later eventually comes around. And resisting change almost always guarantees getting stuck in a rut. That’s no way to live life – heck, it’s not really living at all.
In the first month of this new year, I’ve taken my first few tentative steps into the scary unknown world of change. I have absolutely no idea what will happen. I may succeed beyond my wildest expectations. I may also fall flat on my face and become an astounding failure. What’s important is that I don’t try to hold myself back. I really do love my snooze button, but I think it’s time I stopped putting things off for later and started to embrace the change.
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