Laziness Is In The Eyes
“Laziness is in the eyes!” my father would often snap at me and my younger brother Chimaobim, when we were much younger in a bid to get us into being more proactive in doing our house chores. Those days, there was nothing we hated as much as washing the plates and pots. Of course, nobody liked washing plates. But the dislike my brother and I had for that particular chore was on another level. I remember how it was always very difficult, going to the kitchen and seeing what seemed like a whole lot of utensils clustered in the sink. And then, sitting down for another thirty minutes, thinking of how I was going to manage to wash it all, before starting slowly and always surprisingly finishing much earlier than I expected. My younger brother, I presume was worse. Not only did he not like to do the chore, he grumbled openly. And father being a very observant man, our behaviour and its consistent pattern wasn’t lost on him.
The first day the “Laziness is in the eyes” sermon began was on one of those days when I was supposed to wash the plates and I was sitting on the stool in our kitchen, looking at all the plates and pots from that morning and late in the night, wondering how I would wash them all. Father, probably noticing that he hadn’t heard the clinks of the stainless plates and pots, to show that the washing had begun, came into the kitchen, noiselessly and found me idling away. I was shocked when he spoke up, “Are you not ashamed of yourself?”. But it was already too late to prevent my father from doing that which he knew how to do best: talking!
“Your problem is laziness,” he began. “You come and instead of starting right away, you use your eyes and you look over everything and you say ‘Ooh! The pots and plates are many oo. When will I finish this?’ And you get discouraged and you sit down, grumbling instead of doing the work. But if you begin from one place and don’t look too much at the work, one-two, one-two, before you know it you are done. Laziness is in the eyes! Don’t look at how difficult it will be, start from somewhere.”
From that day, anytime my brother and I exhibited something similar to this behaviour, my father repeated this sermon. It is, you might say, a sermon which featured regularly in our growing up, for my father loves among many things, to talk to his children.
In my very younger years, I was more preoccupied with childhood adventures that I didn’t really implement my father’s words in my life, as much as he would have loved me to do in those days. I don’t feel much bad if he felt disappointed, but of course, his words stuck with me and it is profound how fifteen years after, many of these words come back to me in 3D reality, playing before my eyes, especially in my professional life, now that I am an adult and need to work, not just to earn a living, but to support my younger ones in school as the eldest son.
Many times, have I struggled to finish a particular freelance writing project, not because I didn’t know what exactly to do; but because instead of diving into action after making the outline, I have stopped to survey how long it will take me to complete each section of the work. And Laziness being in the eyes, it ended up magnifying the whole thing for me, and once again, I become that little eight-year old, sitting down on the kitchen stool, thinking of the time it will take to wash all the plates, instead of washing the plates. I have sometimes, spent time which is enough to complete other smaller projects in queue or even the project in sight, thinking of how to pull it off.
The other day, in a stray moment of reflection, I began thinking and it occurred to me that lazy people are only a certain brand of ‘thinkers’. Most of our laziness, if we will admit to ourselves, are a result of being sucked into ourselves, ‘thinking’ of how we can manage to pull off the task, rather than being ensconced in the task itself. I remember when I wrote the first draft of the second novel manuscript I was working on, over 250 pages of A4 paper. It was an effort that had taken five months to achieve. And I pulled it off by simply setting a target of 900–1200 words every morning by 5 am, before preparing for work before 8 am. I write with the Hemmingway style of writing and one of the rules is never to think of writing when you are not writing. You are only allowed to think of it when you return to the table the next morning. One advantage this has is that you never have to think about how much work there is upfront and you keep getting surprised by your story every morning. Yet when I was done with this first draft, I held the bundle of A4 papers in my hand, looked at the tiny handwriting and I wondered how I was going to rewrite all these, on the typewriter, a medium of writing I enjoyed less! Luckily, I thought more of how accomplished I might feel if I manage to pull this off, and so I stopped looking at it and I began from somewhere. And so, the lesson comes back to me that the job becomes harder when we think of how long it will take, rather than getting into the act of working itself.
Three years ago, I wondered how a writer like me who felt exhausted after writing a good short story, would manage to write a whole book! And it was because I kept thinking about all the writing, rewriting, frustrations and all it would take to achieve that, and my mind kept magnifying it, as it always does. It is even more ironical that after consistent practice and adopting the Hemmingway method, from which I developed mine, of having it in mind, but not thinking of it, and adding a few paragraphs, early in the morning as often as I can, I have achieved much more with considerably less pain! I remember reading, about five years back, a profound quote that said, “It is amazing how much you get done, by doing little consistently.”
In general terms, 2019 has been for me, a good year. But it is quite painful that it could have been much better had I not had some of the unprecedented slugging here and there. I know deep down, I could have achieved much more. My friends tell me to take it easy on myself, but I understand myself, better than they do, that the actual problem with me is that I have often spent enough time to do the work, thinking of how long the work will take and how exhausting it will be. Such an irony, if you ask me. An even greater irony is that thinking about the work is often more exhausting than doing the work itself, because doing the work gives you a high sense of responsibility and finishing it inspires you, and as the case may be, keeps you wanting to do more.
If there is one thing I hope to take with myself to 2020, it is a more proactive mindset, that will enable me get started before the temptation to think about how strenuous or bulky the work might be. And even as I embark to take on more responsibilities than I took on this year, that I might achieve much more, by doing as little as I can with each time that passes. And I hope to look back, by this time next year and be surprised by the joy of how much I have gotten done because I have seen a more profound reality of how much can be done by doing little consistently!
