Sorry I'm late.

I usually post on Tuesdays. And so far this worked. Until now. As you might notice, it’s not Tuesday; it’s Friday. So what happened? What was different this time?

You might have read in one of my previous posts that I talked about showing up. I said that showing up is a key element to getting things done. In this instance, I didn’t know what to write about but sat in front of the screen and begun to write. And after some horrible drafts, I managed to write a decent post about showing up.

So what happened this time, you ask? Were all the drafts horrible and I didn’t get any great post out of it? Did my laptop crash and I lost the post? Didn’t I have an internet connection? Did the dog eat my work? No.

The answer is much simpler: I didn’t show up.

And now I could go on about all the reasons for that. I could tell you that I wasn’t feeling well, that the weather was bad, that my mind was occupied with other things, that I had too many other things to do, that I was freezing all day long and so on.

There are always at least a dozen reasons we can come up with to explain why we haven’t done something. And all of the above is indeed true. I was feeling sick, it was raining, I was thinking about a lot of other things and had a lot of other stuff to do, it was cold and so on. But still, all I had to do was to show up.

Instead of going to bed early I could have sat down for 30 minutes and at least tried to write something. Instead of watching a tv show in the afternoon, I could have thought of a topic I could write about. Instead of cleaning the kitchen (yes, I clean to procrastinate, even when it’s an Airbnb) I could have started to draft something to spark an idea for a post.

But no, I didn’t show up. And I felt bad about it the whole time. I knew exactly what I was doing. I knew that I had a good chance to get the post out on Tuesday if I only showed up. But I had a lot of reasons not to do it as you have read earlier.

And then Wednesday came. And there was no post on Tuesday. And as I was laying in bed on Wednesday morning I realized something. I realized that I was hiding behind all the good and bad reasons for not doing what I should have done.

And that’s what we do a lot. We know that we should do something and start to line up reasons why we couldn’t do it, even before it’s over.

And yes, some of this reasons are good, and some are just plain bullshit. But we feel better hiding behind them, and others can’t judge us that quickly if there are reasons for our behavior.

I know that it isn’t bad at all that this post gets posted on a Friday instead of a Tuesday. And that’s true for most things. If we don’t do it, or do it later or let someone else do it, it’s fine.

I think the bigger problem is the hiding behind all the reasons we have or make up. The reasons may be true, but still, if we would have wanted to do it, these reasons most likely wouldn’t have stopped us.

So why can’t we just be honest? Why can’t we tell others the truth? Yes, they might judge us. Yes, it makes us vulnerable. But others may appreciate our honesty because they sometimes feel the same. And isn’t it much better to be frank with each other instead of hiding behind something?

So let me start again: I didn’t do what I should have done for one reason alone: I didn’t want to. What about you?