Why You Keep Saying “Later” — And How to Stop Postponing What You Want - Podcast Transcript

You can listen to this episode here: Listen to Ep 15: Why You Keep Saying "Later"

Have you ever realized you’ve been quietly putting something you really want off for years - not because you can’t do it, but because you keep telling yourself “later”?

In this episode, Blaze explores why so many of us postpone desires that feel nourishing, grounding, and deeply personal, especially when we’re caring for others or managing shared responsibilities. Using the story of a long-delayed garden dream, this conversation unpacks how “someday” can quietly turn into grief, and how February can be a powerful time to reassess what you’re waiting for.

You’ll hear reflections on delayed dreams, functional joy, boundaries around what’s yours, and how to move toward what you want without needing it to be perfect or complete.

This episode is for anyone who’s ready to stop negotiating their future self away and begin, simply, right where they are.

Hello friends! I've had a moment recently where I realized that I've been quietly postponing something that I really, really want. And it's not because I can't do it, but because I kept telling myself later.

And suddenly I was realizing how slippery "later" has actually been for me.

And that I've not been postponing it for a short amount of time but actually almost nine years.

And that seems silly, so I wanted to talk about it and share how sometimes it's so easy for us to delay a real desire, something tangible and regulating and good for yourself.

Thinking that you're doing something good for everybody else. But I kind of want to deconstruct that because I'm realizing that it's kind of a myth that I've been living with myself and it might be something that you're doing too.

So this episode is all about me wanting a garden and how I have put that off in so many ways, just because. (laughs)

So here is where we're at. Something that changed my mind about it recently was realizing that

When you're caring for other people and you're sharing a space and you're managing family dynamics and family needs, it is so easy to say, "I'm gonna do this when things settle," or, "I'll do it when there's more room," or, "I'll do it someday."

And one day you look back and go, "Oh my God, I've been saying that for such a long time. When is it someday?"

When is there space? And I think it harkens back to what everyone told me about having a kid in the first place was

There's never a good time. There's never going to be a moment where everything is perfectly aligned and it's a great time for that.

You have to make the time and make the space or just realize that you're ready. And for me, living in a multi-generational house and having a lot of people to plan around and accommodate,

I realized that in my mind I was putting off big projects of my own, in part to just kind of smooth things over and make life easier for everybody else and also putting off what seemed to me like a frivolous project or something that, you know, is fun but not necessary in order to focus time and resources and...

my cognitive load, right, of managing all of the household stuff into projects that served the actual physical structure of the house, so maintaining the roof, maintaining the water, getting repairs done.

Putting in the geothermal, putting solar panels on, dealing with all of that, which really has been of putting together effort and timelines and coordinating different teams and...

I don't know, even troubleshooting all of the problems that came up with all of these projects.

And all of them have been hugely useful and hugely beneficial to everybody living here.

So I think what I can look at and notice, and I'm sure this is true for so many of you listening as well, is that you're not just planning for yourself a lot of the time.

You're planning for everybody that you care about and the systems that are all around you and wanting to make sure that everybody is well and taken care of and often it feels like it's necessary to put some of your desires on the back burner because they don't seem as important or as necessary or as impactful maybe for everybody.

Now here's what changed my mind about that recently. It wasn't just a single conversation or a single moment.

It was realizing that I've pushed my future off and I keep pushing it off into future years and I had no actual moment in mind where things might start regulating themselves again, or that it might be time for me to make my garden because I thought, well, if I make it, I need to make sure that...

We've also, you know, figured out the drainage of the entire yard and we've like got a permanent place for this stuff.

All of the other things that need to happen first that are more financially demanding, but also necessary, like the driveway and all these other things maybe taking down trees have time to happen and all of those take investment as well.

I don't want to wait and put my life on hold like that, like another 10 or 15 years.

It suddenly just didn't feel okay in my body anymore. And I realized that...

My future self had become negotiable. Because every time I think about my future self, I think about me being you know, a happy middle-aged person and an old lady in a garden and out there puttering with all these beautiful plants that I'm really excited about, and I realize I don't do any of that right now and I keep waiting

and I let my mother-in-law get all the plants and stuff that she wants and put them where she wants, but I don't really feel like I've claimed that space for myself. I'm like, well, why is it okay for other people to have it, but not for me?

And I would come back to thinking, well, this time in your life, you're taking care of people and there's other things for you to do and maybe focus on work and maybe focus on your health and focus on all these other things.

You'll have time for your garden later. And then I also saw that what I was really craving,

I guess what it comes down to is I've tried to patch this before and I don't know if you've done this as well, where instead of doing the thing that you really want you get like a band-aid solution.

So what I've done in the past is I'll buy a plant or an herb and put it somewhere where I think it'll fit, or I'll get a pot for it and then find that because it's not really what I really wanted and it's not placed anywhere where I feel like it has a home. Everybody else also consents that it doesn't really have a home and it doesn't quite belong yet.

And so it gets moved or not taken care of the way I want or it gets replaced with something else.

And because I'm me, I tend to not really argue or say anything about that because I'm like, well, they are using it. They're doing something different. They had a stronger vision than mine or whatever.

But what happened is my need and my desire just got trampled and pooped on and I would be quietly sad and upset, and then wonder, okay, maybe in five or six years, I'll finally have the resources to be able to get a real permanent garden going.

And I'll finally have everything worked out so that I can, I don't know, start gathering the materials or like set up a permanent garden bed in the front yard, which is where I would love to have it, where I can just walk out and touch it.

Rather than in the back where it seems like everybody else would rather have it. I'm like, well, that's not what I want. What I want is right out the front door.

What I want is my herbal garden and making teas. And I don't want it to be tiny. I don't want just one pot.

And I think what I've been doing is just getting a pot of something and then it gets moved or neglected or forgotten because it's tucked away in the back, and I get mad and upset about it, or I don't even think to go out there and use it when I should.

And in my future imaginings of myself, I'd be going out and cutting chives and adding stuff to all of my meals.

And it's just not tucked in a convenient place that's useful.

I'm going to identify a few things that I see in that dynamic for myself, is that I recognize that for me, things really need to be functional in order for me to do it or to appreciate and use something. So having just any old garden wasn't going to work for me.

And I'm sure for other people, like when you've had projects or things that you wanted to work on, when you get something that isn't exactly what you wanted, but someone gave to you anyway or you're making do.

It's nice and you appreciate it, but you never quite use it or embody it or inhabit it the way that you wanted to.

And it's in part because it's not what you really wanted and it's not how you actually work. So part of my discovery with this like aha-moment for myself is, oh my gosh, you're putting off

Something important to yourself that you find so physically and emotionally regulating and my God, do we need that right now? Something to just calm down and center and feel like something that I do with my hands nourishes something and it's evident in the world in front of me and tangible. I need that.

When I'm not able to do it the way that I naturally would reach out to do it, it becomes another obligation rather than the joy. I guess that's what I'm saying is if someone said, "Here I'm going to gift you a garden," and they decided to put it in the back by the shed. I'd be like, "Oh, thanks."

You'd have that feeling of, "You almost heard me. You almost understood my desire, but that's not where I want it. It's not how it works for me."

Because I don't walk to that direction much of the time. It would alter everything about the way that I actually already am living in order to, I don't know, be convenient for someone else. And I'm realizing that so much of

the desires that I have, it's not that they're bigger grand, it's that I need them to work for the way that I work.

I need it to be something that I will actually use that I'll show up for that is easy for me to do.

And that brings me joy because part of the excitement of it goes into the creation for me. I've always been a creative person. I love gardening. I love art.

I love crafting with my hands and learning how to knit and sewing things so it makes sense to me that part of

The joy that I have, imagining my future garden has always been the construction process and how would I like to set it up?

and what have I observed over the last several years? And here's something really, really interesting.

I realized that we've lived here for nine years and in those nine years:

I've been watching and I've been noticing and thinking about the way that the sun rises and sets and where the water pools and where it doesn't and when we get the rain and when we don't where the freezes are in the thaws and what animals come through.

And I have been memorizing it and understanding it as this living breathing system.

And I do that because I'm planning this future garden that I want so badly. I am very aware of where the water goes and when we don't have water and when we do. I know how to conserve that and I've been planning in my head like, "Oh, okay, it makes sense to have a raised garden bed."

So that when the water goes in, I can wick it up and use it without having to run water, which is great because I don't want to waste water.

So I have all of these interesting ideas and thoughts.

And I realized I have them because I care. I have them because this is something fundamental to who I am and the being that I am, and of course I want this. And why would I be putting it off pretty much indefinitely, like forever? And I realized if I kept doing that...

At this point, I'm like three years off of 50, but if I waited another 10 years, I'll be close to 60.

And some of the things that I'd like to grow in a future garden like asparagus, and things like that, take years before they're even productive.

I'm like, if I keep waiting, they're never going to happen. Or by the time I start doing them I'm gonna be older than I want to be to start enjoying it. Like I don't want to have lost an entire decade not enjoying my life.

So that's what I'm really talking about here is wondering why is it that we put off things that we want to have happen, I guess, in retirement or whatever. I started to realize, well, I don't want my whole life to be waited for.

I want to live in my life and I want to be able to enjoy it now. So part of this reckoning that I'm having in February and my joy of dreaming it out is thinking about I've put off a lot of things.

And that's made me kind of sad. And I know I'm not alone in hitting this phase in the middle of February, early February, where you realize that you haven't necessarily accomplished everything that you would hoped you were going to accomplish. And often that's in connection with like last year or the goals that you'd set yourself up for and you're kind of sad and you're wondering why it didn't happen.

But sometimes you're looking back and seeing a pattern and going, "Wow, I haven't accomplished something that I thought I would have had by now."

Or that seems like it's years in the making or will take years to do, when am I ever gonna get started?

And there was real grief and sadness in that for me. I think though that the remedy for that first is noticing it and seeing it.

In recognizing that I had this guilt for myself going, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe you've delayed that so much." There is also this moment of compassion going, "I can see why I did that."

I can see how I have had other concerns and things that really were timely and big. And it made sense that this couldn't happen quite yet.

It also makes sense that I don't need it to be perfect in order to move towards this dream of actually living the way I want to live. And it doesn't have to look like a gorgeously planned amazingly landscaped, like really expensive garden, which I guess might have been...

Some of the reason of delay is thinking, "Well, if I'm going to do it, I should do it perfectly." Or have it match the level of...

I don't know, extravagance or care that everything else seems to have here. But when in reality, I look at my life and the things that have brought joy and gotten like the most positive reaction from even people in my neighborhood.

It's been the time that I chose to paint my front door and garage like lime green, like really bright lime green. Everybody really loved it.

And it was fun and it didn't cost a lot and it was just some time and effort and me out there physically doing something, touching my house and caring for it. And I feel like this garden project that I'm really dreaming into life this February is like that.

It's one of those ideas that you have where you're like, "Oh, it's gestated long enough now that I don't need to delay it anymore."

So now, how am I using this time when it's still bitterly freaking cold?

And, you know, timing isn't gardening time right now.

I'm still using my time and space for dreaming, but I'm recognizing that I need to move my timelines a little bit and make some adjustments to make my life more comfortable in the long term and reassessing what that means for myself for real at this stage in life.

I know that I've done a really good job of planning and a lot of things that I said I was going to do somehow we've managed to do. So things like the geothermal and the solar and all of these huge energy projects and house projects that I remember talking with people about back in 2019 and people going, "Oh, that's amazing." And then talking to them this past year and them going,

You're the only person I know who mentioned projects like this and actually made them happen. So there's a lot of pride I have in accomplishment and going, "Oh, I'm very clear about what I want and I will make it happen."

But I want to apply some of that, getting-it-done-ness to something that seems...

so small or frivolous or not as important. And maybe a garden isn't actually as frivolous as I thought it was.

I want to tell you the story of my garden at our old place.

Because it was really, really cool and it was big and it was such a learning and growing experience for me and I think it's why I have such a connection to wanting to do it again. It feels like a part of who I am.

When we lived in our old place, we ended up making these hexagonal garden shapes that all kind of nestled in with each other like a little honeycomb with walk space in between where you could still mow in between that.

And they were raised beds and they were kind of on a hill so they were terraced as well. And we learned how to do crop rotation in it.

And we had so many vegetables and onions and garlic and kale and collard greens broccoli. We did corn, we had squash, we had beans.

We had cabbages and lettuces and just so many things that we ate all the time through the summer, potatoes in the fall.

the onions, the shallots, like just really great fresh food and tending that felt amazing. We had rhubarb for days. We were not as successful as strawberries there, but we've learned a lot since then.

Doing that was this wonderful daily experience from the spring through the fall, going out in like the early

like planting things and figuring out where things were going to go, which beds were permanent beds, which ones were going to rotate.

And we got to know also the wildlife there and the turkeys that would come through and we hit a stage where

I'd be out there watering in the morning and plucking things and, you know, plucking tomatoes and we'd be making salsa and stuff. But the turkeys would come through and they would not leave because I was there. They'd just stay on the opposite side of the garden at one of the farther hexes and they'd pluck out bugs and slugs and (then) leave.

And it felt so inhabited. Like I felt like I really belonged in that space. I felt really at home in my garden. I could be barefoot in my garden and feel really great.

It just felt nice to nurture something like that. So it makes sense, really wanting to kind of recreate that experience.

But also understanding that one of the reasons that that garden thrived for us was because we put it right out the front door. It wasn't in the back.

We had had gardens for years trying to start gardens in the backyard around the corner.

And what we learned is we never use it if it's back there.

If a garden is hidden or it's hard to get to for you or it's difficult to even mow the lawn to maintain to get out to where it is,

That garden just becomes a weed bed and it becomes something that animals dig up or just we never planted or we forget about it and find years later we're like, "Oh hey, something's growing here," but we didn't intentionally plant it or anything.

That, I don't know, it just makes me realize I love gardening, but I don't love it so much that I'm willing to go places that feel awkward or uncomfortable. I also realize just like with everything else in my life, like if I see it, I'm going to tend to it.

And I want to see the things that I care about and want to tend. I really dislike making anything difficult or hiding anything that's important to me.

And I think tucking away a garden somewhere that's hard to get to simply because it seems like it might be more convenient for neighbors or aesthetics or whatever, that's not going to work for me.

So there's a reason that I want to build something beautiful and build something a little more perennial, I guess, for this season of my life.

To say if I built something that I know kind of comes up on its own and looks beautiful, whether I attend to it or not, that would be perfect because that way it looks deliberate and planned and it's still functional and it can be somewhere where I can go out and just pluck what I need and take what I want and I don't need to plan everything.

So, here's where I'm going with this is:

In my glee of realizing I didn't have to delay anymore and let's plan, I went bananas.

And I decided I was gonna plot out what if I was gonna have my glorious, full hexagons of garden, just as much or bigger than what we had at our other place and have it rotating like all the vegetables that we had plus all these new perennial plants and have an herbal garden and a fairy garden for my daughter and all of these fun things.

And it was so fun, so fun to do.

I went through and just listed out every kind of food I might want to eat. I went through the zones to go like what actually could grow here.

I decided to ask like AI which garden beds would flow best and if the sunlight is going this way and we have the hexes arranged in this direction and these are the like - I lettered and numbered them like A through G and they're going this way.

Where would they best optimize in relation to each other, in relation to the way the wind blows, and the sun goes, and the shadows fall, and the animals migrate?

And I came up with this incredible ecosystem of things I can build. For me, that feels glorious. It's like plotting a game and winning. And I haven't had to do anything yet.

And here's what I also want to say is after all of that, after plotting out for, you know, like a thousand square feet of crazy gardening space.

I was able to look at it and say, "Okay, Blaze, for real." Do you need to become a farmer? Do you actually want that much work? Because it's a lot of work.

And to set that up is incredibly expensive and it is a huge investment just like it was at the old house, but now more so because inflation has been insane. And it's going to easily cost two or three times more to do the same garden that we did, you know, 15 years ago.

So, realistically, could I just start with the one that I really wanted, the one that's starting the whole dream in the first place, and could I just really love on that?

And start it, knowing that I could add onto it. And I could keep going. And if I felt like in another year I want to add another garden hex, I could.

And that felt like such a relief and so much smaller and more doable and less exhausting and less maintenance, and like something that if I built could look beautiful.

That could be something that gives me energy rather than takes it away. And I guess that's where...

I want to leave you with this week is to say, "What is it that you're thinking about that maybe you've been delaying for yourself because you just feel like maybe it's for someday, maybe it's for later?"

But if you really thought about what would regulate you and make you feel the most at home and embodied and safe and happy in your life.

Not just what you're hoping for your future, but what if you could just kind of move closer to that future now?

What would that project be? And using the time in February really wisely.

How would you dream about it? What if you gave yourself permission to just go crazy and dream it out as huge and extravagant and ridiculous as you ever would want it to be?

And have space also to say what's doable right now that adds to that vision, that moves me towards it, that's maybe something that's either more affordable or less time intensive, but still gets me doing the thing that I really, really wanted to do the way I actually wanted to do it?

Because I think that's important. So what I want to say about dreaming big and coming up with this crazy huge plan, it felt so good. It was so permissive for me to be like, this is what I really, really want.

And then to go, "Okay, and what's really possible for real right now?" Definitely not all of it, but maybe some.

Okay, if some of it's possible, which part would I like to start with so that I feel like I'm doing the tangible thing and I'm putting it exactly where I wanted it to live?

But I'm doing the part first that makes the most sense that will weather storms the longest that will help me test it out even and feel into it and go, "Is this something that I really want to put even more effort into or is just one box enough?"

And I think the internal truth that I'm feeling right now is maybe just one garden hex would be enough for me.

I'd like to do a second one because I really want to have my daughter have her own little garden bed as well.

But again, that's maybe my dream. It might not be her dream. So I have to talk to her about it and say, "Hey, if I make this..."

I guess I want to put boundaries up about my garden. I want to be like, "No, I want my garden to be my garden. I don't want it to be..."

Up for negotiation, I don't want to share it. I don't want to share maintenance. I want to be completely 100% responsible for caring for that entire hex myself. I don't mind sharing responsibility for all the other plants that we have and the walkway and the garden, the cute things in the back.

That's fine. I don't mind sharing those. What I'm tired of is waiting for the garden that I get to tend without interruption.

And I think that's a theme I've been sensing in my life lately is just realizing that I want my life to be able to happen without feeling like it's constantly negotiable and constantly interruptible.

So even the expression of the dream is me going like, okay I'm tired of interrupting forever the idea of me having something that I'd like to work on. So how can I set it up now and not have that also be interruptible? Could I be responsible for all of its creation myself, and if so, how do I also let people know, like, this one's mine, so if my daughter wants to have her fairy garden, she's gonna have to have her own space.

And she doesn't get to co-opt mine. And that feels so deliciously selfish. I just wanted to share that because I know I'm not alone.

Having that feeling of loving people desperately and wanting them to have every good thing and also feeling like

Hands off, leave me alone, let me do my own thing and I don't want to share. That's just where I'm at. And I think it's a healthy urge and it's something that we should talk about.

We all need our own stuff and our own space and our own dreams. So it's okay.

If you have heard this episode and you're recognizing yourself, there's something that I want as well and I don't want it negotiable and I don't want it shared and I don't want it compromised, I want to do it my way.

Goodness, I want that for you too! So I'm cheering you on.

I hope you have a wonderful week.

Come back next week and we'll talk more about ways that we can move in to the spring that's coming. It's not here yet. Oh my goodness. This winter is so long.

But to be able to use this time well and feel into it and use the energy that actually is available, which is not all of the doing energy, but it is a lot of the planning energy that's certainly starting to feel available right now.

And we'll use it to the best way that we can and help ourselves live a more embodied, more true-to-ourselves existence.

That is the work that we do in Anchored & Alive in the course and on the podcast. And I'm so happy that you're here. All right, I'll see you next week.

Related Episodes

If you’ve been resonating with the theme of delayed dreams and energy returning slowly, you might also enjoy:

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• Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
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