Lazy by nature...?

Wow. After a seven year hiatus in blogging, I am writing my second post less than 12 hours after competing the previous one. Perhaps I know that all my good intentions to write frequently and keep a healthy record of my life are likely to be short-lived and thereby consistent with most endeavours I venture with.

If I am completely honest with you, I am not the world's, best known starter-finisher. I tend to get excited about new projects and experiences but ask me to finish something and I might be a tad challenged. Recently I managed to complete a summer dress I started making in March 2016! I started it during a wonderful, six week sewing class that I stumbled across in Bristol. Unfortunately I was unwell for the last of the six lessons and missed possibly the most difficult lesson of all; learning how to sew in an invisible zip. That task plus the hems and attaching the sleeves were staring me in the face, every time I came across the unfinished dress during the last 12 months. Knowing that I hadn't managed to enjoy the dress last Summer, I promised myself I would finally finish it this year. It may have taken 13 months (and there's still a tiny bit of hand-sewing left to do) but I finally finished it and I am so glad! It's one less unfinished project to berate myself about.

I've often discussed with fellow medics (and here I refer to those of us who started medicine at the tender age of eighteen) how a medical degree is excellent for the procrastinator and the lazy by nature. Yes, it's challenging. The exams, the deadlines and the shorter holidays when compared to non-medics all take their toll but they also set you up to only respond to external threats. The rest of the time, we wander around the uni campus knowing that as long as we jump through a few hoops, we'll get there eventually. It's those awful, adrenaline-inducing, cortisol-raising external threats that keep us pressing on. The exams, the viva, the nightmare of potential re-sits through the summer holidays. All these penalties for non-responsiveness mean that we do so, in order to avoid further punishment. Once we're through the door, we know we can rest on our laurels a bit, maybe not consciously but I believe it's in our psyche somewhere and starts from a young age. Perhaps things have changed a bit now but it was part of the system I was educated in and the remarkable fact is, that the lazy by nature could fly through it without being spotted. Laziness isn't an inherently bad quality, if you get the most important jobs done and you're lazy about the less important stuff, i.e. folding your laundry, doing the ironing, you can just about get by but after a while it starts to get to you and you wonder how you've managed to live through so many years, masquerading as an adult human without conquering such a fatal flaw.