mid-February and I’m procrastinating

Maybe what’s required here is a simple mindset shift, but I can’t help but feel like January, February, and dare I say it March are the longest months of the year. Taken together they feel entirely too long, like a whole year on their own, and being smack in the middle of this chunk of what feels like extended time is making me think too much.

(Who am I kidding, I always think too much.)

Nonetheless, winter is all gray and bleached and lacking in color and it feels a bit rough right now. I want to jump ahead a few months to longer days, a hint of warmth.

It’s not just the weather and the lack of color, though. In January, the company I’ve worked for for nearly 10 years was bought. Not that I haven’t seen a rollercoaster of change in those 10 years already—I have. But this change is different. Suddenly we’re much bigger. I considered myself a medium-sized fish in a small but growing pond. Now, I’m a tiny fish in what feels like a large and unfamiliar pond. I’m not completely sure what’s next.

I don’t hate change, and I love to learn new things, but I’m still craving some familiarity, grasping at a little something that makes me feel like I’m still in my element. Maybe I’m being dramatic here (probably I’m being dramatic here). I still get to do what I love and am good at every day. Maybe that’s all the security anyone is entitled to in this ever-shifting environment of “work”? But this change has also made me think. Have I invested too much of my identity in what I do rather than who I am? Do I even know how to answer the question of who I am these days?

I keep saying I’ll devote time to things (art, writing, cooking, organizing, friendships) when I’m done with school, which thankfully is this summer. But, has school been a way to put off creating an identity for myself at this stage in my life? Um… maybe.

Anyway, I am on the lake for the weekend attempting to focus on a paper I need to write and turn in tomorrow, and my brain is having none of it. Instead, it’s roiling with ideas, all unrelated to the task at hand.

I was in full stall mode earlier this afternoon regarding the paper that’s due tomorrow, which made me think I should bundle up and take a walk on the beach, which I did, and while it may not have set me straight for getting to work on the paper I realize now it was exactly the thing I needed. And guess what I found? A cold and windy beach, yes, but something interesting, something I’ve never seen before.

I mean, I’ve seen lotus seed pods before. Over the last several years, they have been washing up on the shoreline, just a random one or two at a time. And I still today only saw a handful of the actual pods over the half mile stretch of beach I walked. But what is really unusual is that the shoreline is absolutely littered with the seeds from these pods. Where did they come from? Some inland lake, I imagine, as I don’t think lotus plants actually grow in Lake Michigan. So how did these they wash up here? It’s a mystery to me, and I want to know.

Aren’t they gorgeous, though? The stark black of the pod against the pale sand. The seeds that look like smooth, shiny pebbles until you pick one up and realize they’re smooshy in a way a pebble just isn’t.

I can’t say the walk or the seeds or the pods have inspired me to work on this paper, but I’m going to get to it, really. Just as soon as I can make myself stop procrastinating.