Fairy Tales of Procrastination, Gestation, and Action
Copyright © 2026 by Lois E. Wilkins, PhD, APRN
All rights reserved.
I have been thinking about procrastination, which, of course, is one more thing one can do while procrastinating, and there is something almost seductive about the amount of thinking that can surround a thing that has not yet been done. I can consider it from every direction, gather what I need, make a list, change the list, read something that seems important before I begin, and then discover something else that might be equally important. By the end of all this I can be quite tired, although the thing itself remains exactly where I left it.
There is a rather inelegant phrase for this that I have come to appreciate: mental masturbation. It is not the same as reflection, and I value reflection too much to confuse the two. There are things that need to be carried for a long time before we know what they are asking of us, just as dreams, poems, grief, and even decisions can require a period when something is moving beneath the surface although very little appears to be happening. Sometimes a piece of writing follows me for months before I understand what it wants to become, and that kind of waiting feels alive.
There is another kind of waiting, however, in which I already know what needs to be done, and I have begun to notice it in the most ordinary places. I can stand in the shower wondering whether I am going to wash my hair today or simply shower, considering how my hair looks, what I am doing later, how long it will take to dry, whether it really needs washing today, or whether tomorrow might make more sense. None of this is an important decision, yet the mind is perfectly capable of turning it into one until I stop thinking about it and reach for the shampoo.
The moment my hand reaches for the bottle, the entire discussion disappears because the action has answered the question. The energy that only seconds before was circling around the possibilities suddenly has somewhere to go, which makes me wonder whether sometimes we do not think our way out of procrastination at all but move our way out of it, allowing the smallest physical action to break the enchantment created by thought.
The old stories knew something about this long before we invented words such as productivity and procrastination. In The Golden Bird, a king discovers that one of the golden apples in his garden disappears each night, and eventually a golden bird is discovered. The king’s sons set out to find it, and the youngest encounters a fox, one of those fairy-tale animals who knows considerably more about what is happening than the human being does.
The fox gives the young man remarkably clear instructions about what he must do when he finds the bird. When the young man finally reaches it, the golden bird is sitting in a simple wooden cage, although nearby there is a beautiful golden cage that seems far more appropriate for such a magnificent creature. The fox has specifically warned him not to move the bird, but the young man looks at the golden bird and then at the golden cage and decides, quite reasonably, that surely a golden bird belongs in a golden cage, entering that almost imperceptible space between what we already know and what we actually do.
Kevin would recognize the territory because his family has lived near that space for generations. Mice have certain advantages when it comes to observing human beings because they can remain unnoticed beneath desks, behind bookshelves, and along the edges of rooms where people are very busy preparing to do something. Kevin has probably watched someone sharpen a pencil that did not need sharpening, move papers from one side of a desk to another and then back again, or open one more book because there was something that absolutely had to be checked before the first sentence could be written.
His ancestors undoubtedly watched much the same thing, although the objects have changed, and I suspect every age has had its golden cages. Ours simply offers more of them because we can now spend hours researching something we already understand, reconsidering a decision we have essentially made, imagining a conversation instead of having it, or preparing ourselves to begin something that requires no further preparation.
Mental masturbation becomes such an uncomfortable but useful phrase here because the mind is not inactive. It may be extraordinarily busy while psychic energy moves in a circle, creating the experience of activity without requiring the vulnerability of action, much as I can turn the insignificant matter of washing my hair into a decision until my hand reaches for the shampoo and thought no longer has anything to negotiate.
I am reminded of another story that has followed many of us from childhood, although its traveler moves among planets rather than through forests. In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, the Little Prince encounters a succession of adults on his journey toward Earth, each enclosed within a world that has somehow become mistaken for life itself. Among them is the businessman who spends his existence counting the stars, calculating their number because he believes that possessing the number means possessing the stars. He is terribly busy and considers himself a serious man, yet the Little Prince quietly exposes the strangeness of an activity that consumes enormous attention without creating relationship with anything being counted.
There is something painfully familiar in the businessman because we too can count, organize, research, calculate, prepare, reconsider, and perfect while remaining convinced that all this activity is evidence that we are moving forward. Like him, we may become so occupied with the accounting of life that we fail to notice we are not actually living the thing we are thinking about.
Even more interesting to me is the geographer, who possesses great books filled with knowledge about mountains, rivers, oceans, deserts, and cities, yet does not go out to see any of them. Exploration belongs to explorers while his task is to remain at his desk and receive their reports, creating the almost comic image of a man surrounded by descriptions of places he will never enter. There is something uncomfortably recognizable in him because we too can know a great deal about the territory without ever putting our feet on the road.
The businessman and the geographer offer slightly different versions of the same enclosure, with one mistaking incessant activity for meaningful engagement and the other mistaking knowledge about experience for experience itself. The young man in The Golden Bird has a fox pointing toward the road, while Saint-Exupéry’s geographer has knowledge of roads he does not travel, and somewhere between them sits the contemporary person with an astonishing amount of information available and perhaps one very simple thing that needs to be done. Sometimes the distance between those worlds is no greater than the distance between my hand and the shampoo bottle.
Yet not every pause before action is avoidance. Sleeping Beauty offers another kind of stillness, one in which an entire kingdom sleeps outside ordinary time until something has ripened sufficiently for the thorn hedge to open. In The Three Feathers, Dummling appears to do almost nothing while his brothers hurry away, yet he remains where his feather has fallen, and from that place an entirely unexpected world opens beneath his feet. Fairy tales therefore do not tell us that all waiting is failure, because sometimes we are asleep because something in us must sleep, and sometimes we remain still because the feather has not yet shown us where to go.
A seed beneath the earth is not procrastinating, nor is a dream whose meaning has not yet disclosed itself, a grief that cannot be hurried, or a piece of writing whose final shape remains somewhere beyond our reach. Gestation has its own rhythm, and forcing movement before its time can become another way of refusing to listen.
The Golden Bird, however, asks a more troublesome question about what happens when the fox has already told us what to do and we know perfectly well what comes next. Perhaps that is one way of distinguishing gestation from procrastination, because in gestation there is still something we genuinely do not know, while in procrastination we may already know the next small thing that needs to happen and continue creating increasingly sophisticated reasons not to do it.
The question then becomes not simply why we procrastinate, but what continuing to think allows us to avoid. Thinking preserves possibility because the book I have not written can still be the book I imagine, the conversation I have not had can still end in every possible way, and the decision I have not made allows all the roads to remain open. Once I act, something changes, and the imagined enters an actual world that has an inconvenient habit of answering back.
There is risk in bringing anything out of imagination and into life because a manuscript can be rejected, a conversation can go badly, a decision closes other possibilities, and something that has lived beautifully in the mind may become smaller, stranger, or more ordinary once we give it form. We can therefore think about it a little longer, all the while experiencing ourselves as deeply engaged with something we may actually be avoiding.
The young man in The Golden Bird receives instructions, departs from them, gets himself into trouble, and requires the fox’s help again, yet what interests me most is that the fox returns. There is something wonderfully forgiving in this because the tale does not require the young man to become wise before the journey can continue. He learns through repeatedly getting it wrong, and the threshold appears again, although not always in exactly the same form.
Perhaps procrastination deserves some of that mercy because most of us do not need another accusation that we have failed to use our time properly. What may be more useful is curiosity about the golden cage itself, about what makes it so attractive, what it allows us not to risk, and whether somewhere beneath all the thinking we have already heard the fox.
Kevin, I suspect, would make the matter considerably simpler because he would look at the papers, the books, the lists, the open computer, and whatever else I had assembled around myself in preparation, and then he would look toward the forest. Mice have little patience for elaborate explanations when there is somewhere to go, and eventually neither do fairy tales.
There is a time for sleeping, a time for waiting beside the feather, and a time for allowing what is still unknown to remain unknown, but there is also a moment when we realize that we have known for quite some time. When that moment arrives, the next movement need not be heroic because it may be no larger than reaching for the shampoo, opening the document, making the call, putting on the shoes, or placing one foot on the path, allowing action itself to answer the question that thought has kept alive.
The fox has already given the instruction, the road is still there, and the bird is waiting somewhere beyond the place where thinking ends and movement begins.