We all do it. We put things off and sometimes years can go by and we still haven’t done the deed. We figure the thing will always be there when we get to it. The trouble is that’s not always true.
I’d been wanting a Cosco stool like the one we had at work. It was a folding two-step stool, but the biggest draw for me was that you could pick it up with one hand and it would immediately fold up. This stool did not have a locking mechanism, and the movement was so loose and free that you didn’t need to push it closed.
I wanted one. Badly. The trouble was I wanted one EXACTLY like the one at work which was Hunter Green, the perfect color to match our kitchen. None of the local stores sold them in any color but I found one on the internet. It was white so I did not order it holding out for a Hunter Green stool.
Two years passed and I’d given up on finding a green one, so I went to the website to order the white one. It wasn’t there. I searched the internet high and low to discover that Cosco was no longer making the easy-close step stool, and neither was anybody else as far as I could tell.
I even called them on the phone. I guess all it takes is a couple of careless people to misuse an item and cause themselves harm and the next thing you know, safety features are forced on the rest of us that we don’t want, such as auto-locking step stools.
I know it sounds silly, the quest for the easy-close step stool, but if you’ve got your heart set on something, it isn’t silly at all. I even considered posting an ad on Craigslist offering to buy someone a brand new locking step stool, in trade for their existing easy-close step stool. Perhaps my polar opposite is out there wishing they had one that locked, but can’t justify buying it when they already have one that doesn’t. I could only hope to get so lucky.
What are you procrastinating over? What are you putting off that would make you very unhappy if the choice were no longer available to you? Whether it’s a small purchase or a proposal of marriage, if you don’t have a really good reason for putting it off, then go for it, take the next step, don’t miss out on something you really want.
* * * * *
By the way, if you want to know what happens when you procrastinate over training a puppy, Dakota is the end result. She was seven months old when we adopted her, having been bounced from place to place after not being trained by her original owners. She was awful, absolutely awful, and I believe that if we hadn’t brought her into our family, she’d have been killed at a dog shelter. Don’t let that be your cute little puppy’s fate. Train him while he’s young, before he morphs into a Bad Dog. Dakota was lucky in finding us. Most untrained dogs are not so lucky.
