Why I don’t do most things on time

Some time ago, I happened to pay a visit to the dentist. I say ‘happened’ because I didn’t go there to get myself examined. I was there to have my daughter’s teeth checked. But while I was waiting, the dentist insisted that I should get my teeth looked at too. So reluctantly, against my better instincts, I let her examine me. It turned out that I had a couple of cavities and more than a few enamel abrasions, the treatment of which caused a small implosion in my bank account. I was also duly admonished for not taking better care of my dental health. “You should get a dental checkup every six months. Just to make sure that everything is okay,” she told me as she peeled her latex gloves off. “Also, you are brushing too hard. You should use a soft brush, not a medium one. And flossing. Very important for you, because your wisdom teeth are crooked.” I took her advice to heart and stopped by the supermarket on the way home to buy a packet of floss, a soft toothbrush, and a 5-Star chocolate bar to maintain balance in the universe.

This isn’t the first time that I have been told off for not taking care of something. Many things around me (and also possibly in me) are falling to bits or degrading slowly due to disuse or disrepair. And I am okay with it. Here’s another example. A few months ago, my wife decided that our home had become unbearably filthy. There was dust on the ceiling fans, cockroaches in the wardrobes, tarantulas living out their retirement in the storage lofts; and so on. The regular maids who do our cleaning apparently lacked the forearm strength needed to do a thorough job. So I volunteered. To make some calls and hire a professional cleaning crew of course. They showed up one Friday morning with a variety of cleaning supplies and got to work. Midway through their duties, they took a break to give me some advice. I was being very careless, they said. The chimney filters in the kitchen should be washed in hot water every Sunday or the grime would trickle into the food that was being cooked underneath. Fans should be cleaned, ideally every month, but 3 months was also acceptable frequency. All furniture should be moved; the floor underneath swept and mopped, and the furniture itself disinfected every fortnight. Needless to say, I was overjoyed when they finished and left.

I am not the slovenly slacker that you probably now think I am. It is just that I don’t care for chores. I am not lazy—the neglecting of things like teeth and electrical appliances is an informed choice. I can feel some of you scoffing. Who really cares about chores, you may ask. People do it because they need to be done, you may say. I agree. They do need to be done. But I am not going to do a vast majority of them anyway.

I wasn’t always like this. On the contrary, ever since I was little, I have obsessed over how to live my life like a Swiss clock. Growing up, I was fed a steady diet of stories about good children who always do things on time. They wake up with the first rays of the morning sun; help their mothers with breakfast, pack their lunch, go to school, and take copious notes of everything their teachers say. After school, they head straight back home to do their homework before going out to play for exactly one hour—after which they clean their room, set up the table for dinner and then revise what they had learned in school during the day. This is the sort of child that is loved by pets and the elderly. I have been a father for four years now, during which I have had the misfortune of having to interact with a range of children thanks to my daughter’s social engagements, but I am yet to meet this mythical child.

Actually, I tried very hard to be this child but I couldn’t. My temperament wasn’t suited for it. I would be successful in phases and be able to stick to a routine for a few days at a time, usually because I wanted approval from the grown-ups, but I’d inevitably slip. I would discover a good book (detective novels usually) that would keep me up at night or find a new hobby (mostly variations of collecting things—stamps, coins, WWF cards, etc) that would get priority over homework. And then in the early 90s, cable TV came to Hyderabad and everything went down the drain.

But thanks to the propaganda that I was exposed to as a child, the desire to be this organized, well-oiled time machine persisted into adulthood, like a stubborn skin rash that waxes and wanes with season but never really goes away. And even now, in my weak moments, I sometimes look at things around me and wish that I could be that person.  I have fairly low aspirations. No mansions and luxury cars for me. All I want sometimes is to be is the type that wakes up at 5 am, goes for a jog, has a two-egg omelet for breakfast, reaches office by 9, is out by 5 and in bed by 10. You know the type that I am talking about. It’s the type that plans ahead, knows what their monthly expenses are; the type that uses calendars and schedules their vacation time months in advance. The type that will definitely not forget to make regular dental appointments or clean kitchen chimneys every Sunday.

But I can’t. I have realized this over time. I just can’t be that way. The list of tasks that you have to do in modern life is long and unforgiving. I have limited intellectual and emotional capital. If I were to try to be a model citizen and invest my time in all of the things that society expects me to do, I’d be spreading myself too thin. I would have very little time to do the things that I really want to do. So I decided some time ago that I am going to junk all that. Screw to-do lists and time management apps and electrical appliances and warranty periods. Screw this constant propaganda to organize and optimize. The next time an AC repairman tells me that I should have remembered to clean the AC filters to save on costs, I will kick him in his condescending balls. Just take my money and go. Don’t bother me with advice or common sense. I don’t care for either.

I accept that this means that some things in my life will be shitty. But I am not going to bother with it. I am instead going to focus my energy on things that are important to me. Right now, that happens to be writing and learning how to code. This may change as time progresses but putting my energies into these couple of things, I think, will make my life more peaceful and wholesome. Of course, there are some chores that I cannot avoid, because the penalty for not doing them is too high (like filing tax returns and paying my daughter’s school fees). Those I will do, but grudgingly and only at the last minute. Just like I accept that some things in life will be shitty, I also accept that I will sometimes have to do things that I don’t like. But I will minimize these things as much as possible.

All I need to do now is convince my wife that my philosophy is sound the next time she asks my help in cleaning up after dinner. I’ll let you know how it goes.