2026-01-08-stagecraft (procrastination)

I am preparing a syllabus.

Better said, I am preparing to prepare a syllabus. I have opened the syllabus from last year. I scroll. I rename the file. I save it as v1, even though I know this is not yet version one of anything.

Preparing to prepare a syllabus—preparing to teach a sixteen-week course—activates a familiar kind of nervous attention in me. When I try to understand what this moment feels like, my body answers before my mind does. The sensation is not abstract. I recognize it as the same charged stillness that precedes other long commitments, ones that cannot be rushed and cannot be faked.

The image that comes to me is a starting line.

Early in the morning, as the dawn is still breaking, I park my car and join the quiet milling of other runners. We wait. We stand. We avoid each other’s eyes and then make brief, unnecessary conversation. I take my turn at the Port-A-Potties. I check that my shoelaces are tied the way I would like them to be tied: snug in the toe box, looser at the top of the tongue. I check them again.

I pack the pockets of my running vest with care that borders on superstition. Two 500-mL squeezable bags of water with the straws sticking up in parallel, past my jawline. A dense trail bar, broken in advance into thirds or fifths, depending on the course length. At least thirty gummy bears. Toilet paper, twenty-one squares, folded small, enough for up to three pitstops. A ziplock bag for trash. A silk hankie clipped to the left side of my vest. Vaseline. Salt capsules. A windbreak, either worn or waiting. I inventory and re-inventory, as if the act of counting might confer some protection.

I know the gun will go off soon, but there is this empty pause before it happens. A pocket of time that belongs to no one in particular. The group hums with small movements and unfinished gestures. People pace—not the pace of running, not yet, but the pace of waiting. Back and forth. A few steps forward, a few back. Hands on hips. Adjusting straps that do not need adjusting.

Pacing, I have learned, is both about rate and restlessness. It is about how slowly you move so that you can keep moving at all, and it is about what the body does when it is asked to wait. Teaching, it turns out, contains both kinds of pacing.

There is nothing else to do but start, to cross the line and begin the long forward motion. But it is not quite time.

So I tend to my nervous energy by writing. By reorganizing files. By changing the font of last year’s syllabus and then changing it back again. I fidget with whiteboard markers, testing which ones are dry and which ones still have life in them. I sketch half-formed maps of the semester. I line up weeks like stepping stones, then erase them.

I tell myself I am stalling. I also tell myself I am preparing.

I want the semester to feel like an adventure. I want students to experience awe, to encounter a few landmarks that arrest their gaze.

But when I think honestly about the trail races I've completed, I don’t remember looking up much. What I remember is the ground immediately in front of me. The mottled earthtones of rock and mud and dirt and exposed roots. The discipline of putting one foot down carefully and lifting the other. My memories are forged in effortful focus. Sometimes in fear. Occasionally in joy, though that joy was often just relief in disguise. Relief at making it to the next aid station, relief at cresting a climb, relief that nothing had gone wrong. Relief at being done.

Most learning is not cinematic. It is incremental. It happens with the head slightly down, attention narrowed, working through something that resists. The beauty, if there is any, is rarely visible in the moment.

Before I write a syllabus, I inventory. I count how many weeks I have. Sixteen. How many active hours I will be on stage with each class. Thirty-seven point five. How many students will pass through the room. Over one hundred, though never all at once. How many days I will stand at the board. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for one class. Tuesdays and Thursdays for the other. I count the operable windows against the back of room. I count the seats. I count the number of doors.

None of this appears on the syllabus.

What does appear, eventually, is a versioned document. I have learned this pattern well enough now to trust it, even if I do not entirely understand it. I write the syllabus and name it v1. I post it. Then I meet the students. I stand in the room with them. I hear the questions they ask and the ones they do not. Within the first week, I write v2. v2 changes in substantive ways. It endures for at least half the semester. It is the syllabus that actually governs our days. Then, sometime before the final quarter, v3 emerges. A modest course correction or two. A shift in emphasis. A sacrifice in recognition of reality. Occasionally there is a v4, though by then nothing substantive changes. Only administrative details. Grading systems. Dates. Accounting.

The syllabus, I have come to believe, is not a blueprint but a living document. It behaves less like a plan and more like a landscape, shaped by erosion and use. You can predict its general contours, but not its precise form or the paths that will be worn down across its surface by each new set of travelers. The changes happen slowly, then all at once, as they often do over a semester.

This is where procrastination gathers, as a kind of fog in the staging area. It isn’t something I look at directly. It’s just there, settling in low places. I don’t know whether it signals preparation or resistance, and I’ve stopped trying to decide. I only know that it shows up reliably in this interval before beginning. It doesn’t lift all at once. There isn’t a moment when it disappears. Instead, there comes a morning when I realize I’m already moving, looking out at their faces, and the fog is behind me.

For now, it is still early morning. The air is cool. The course exists as weight rather than momentum. I am standing just behind the line, adjusting straps, checking laces, feeling the familiar mix of dread and anticipation. This pause is not wasted time. It is the last moment when the semester belongs only to me.