A soft rain hammers at the window. I’ve pushed the couch to the other side of the coffee table because I need to get closer to my floor lamp. In front of me is a stack of 40 student essays, unopened and ungraded. The water I boiled for tea went cold an hour ago and I’m looking up the age of celebrities on Wikipedia. David Hasselhoff (born 17 July 1952). Dannii Minogue (born 20 October 1971). Has my afternoon been wasted? Is this … procrastination?
Today the P-word has a bad reputation. Psychologists link it with increased anxiety, diminished self-esteem and depression. And magazines feature articles with headlines such as “How to Stop Procrastinating, NOW!” Am I one of the 20% of the population with “chronic procrastination”? A few years ago, this would have alarmed me – but now I no longer worry. I embrace days like this. Because an obscure idea I discovered in a work of medieval theology has taught me how to relax.
For over a decade I’ve been researching the history of the seven deadly sins. It turns out that the medieval wisdom applied to these habits can be mapped on to the modern world pretty well. But it was the fourth sin, sloth, that really opened my eyes. Sloth never meant “laziness”. This was always a bad English translation. The original Greek word was acedia, and according to the Summa de vitiis from the 1230s, it was really a combination of boredom, depression, anxiety and despair. Sloth isn’t boredom without a direction. It’s boredom in spite of a direction.
Across the self-help texts of the 1200s and 1300s I have discovered two approaches to procrastination: one is destructive, but the other is inspiring, even life-affirming. And the difference depends on how, in those wasted moments, we engage our hearts. Dante Alighieri described the “wrong” approach as one of sleepwalking towards disaster. Boredom works by anaesthetising our minds, leaving us open to manipulation. We become vulnerable to chasing after things that, although shiny and seductive, are often rotten at the core.
What was the answer, then? The best medieval theologians never believed it was possible to expunge any of the deadly sins altogether. They felt the “right” approach to something like procrastination was to let it happen, but to direct it towards something that does us some good. Bernard of Clairvaux put it best: living a good life is like running a marathon over rough terrain. There will be days of apathy, of boredom, of numbness. And on those days we need to make sure we stay awake and alert. So long as we engage our brains, there’s a sweetness even in the most trivial distraction that can awaken our sleeping hearts.
Dante knew exactly what this meant. In his philosophical treatise Convivio, he describes a time in his life of acute boredom and depression; a “strangeness” that left him unwilling to do any of the things he used to love. Distracting himself, Dante picked up two books: Boethius’s Consolation and Cicero’s On Friendship. And although he was only hoping to extinguish his boredom, these books ended up changing his life. Procrastination, done well, can open the doors to creativity and purpose.
