The secret to my sauce has been simple: never give up and always do what needs to be done today, now. In part these two things came from my upbringing and then were reinforced over young adulthood. My parents, despite wanting to do better for us, often put dreams away into the distant horizon. “One day” is how they responded to things we wanted be it vacations or consumer items. What we learned from this was to put dates, goals, plans into place if we wanted something to happen.

In high school and then college, I learned how to take a larger task and to break it down into more manageable parts. Other people’s work, like Anne Lamont’s famous essay “Bird by Bird” reinforced the idea that with enough planning, really there wasn’t much I couldn’t do. This formula helped me finish two thesis projects during my Masters degree. It got me through several very low valleys as I was writing my PhD dissertation. Helped me plan a wedding in another country while being thousands of miles away. In short it was the elastic band that adapted to fit any situation in my life including the various jobs I’ve had over the past five years.

I’m thirty-one, so past the quarter life crisis stage and too young for the mid-life crisis but I feel myself slowing down. I could blame it on the pregnancy and am sure that it does have something to do with the overall lack of energy and fatigue I feel. Or it’s my priorities re-aligning. But this seems strange because the things I always thought made people shift their focus during pregnancy – getting sick, having complications, the onset of multiples – are not true in my case.

It may be that the past five years of full tilt running are catching up with me. As in most of the nightmares I have about plays that I preformed in, these come months if not years after the physical fact of being on stage. This lull may be my mind saying, whoa, we need a breather here in order to keep going. Like the farming practice of crop rotation when fields were planted with different crops to make sure they didn’t go dry, my mind may be putting in it’s own request to slow down in order to be fertile again in a few months.

All I know is that procrastination, something I’ve never known much about, has set up residence at work and at home. And it’s not welcome. I’ve posted other entries about how to get rid of it. Now I wait to hear some of your suggestions.