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【新媒体中心·四六级专栏】学英语四六级阅读篇(七十三)

2026-05-08 11:32:03

ART · 媒

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2026· ENGLISH

How to use procrastination to your advantage

如何将拖延变成你的优势

A soft rain hammers at the window. I’ve pushed the couch to the other side of the coffee table because I need to get closer to my floor lamp. In front of me is a stack of 40 student essays, unopened and ungraded. The water I boiled for tea went cold an hour ago and I’m looking up the age of celebrities on Wikipedia. David Hasselhoff (born 17 July 1952). Dannii Minogue (born 20 October 1971). Has my afternoon been wasted? Is this … procrastination?

细雨轻轻敲打着窗户。我把沙发推到咖啡桌的另一边，因为我需要更靠近落地灯。在我面前，是一摞40篇学生作文，尚未打开、也未批改。我为泡茶烧的水在一小时前就已经凉了，而我却在维基百科上查名人的年龄。大卫·哈塞尔霍夫（1952年7月17日出生）。丹妮·米洛（1971年10月20日出生）。我的整个下午是不是被浪费了？这是不是……拖延？

Today the P-word has a bad reputation. Psychologists link it with increased anxiety, diminished self-esteem and depression. And magazines (like the ones I just sorted into a date-ordered stack) feature articles with headlines such as “How to Stop Procrastinating, NOW!” Am I one of the 20% of the population with “chronic procrastination”, the lifelong tendency to avoid doing the things I should be doing? A few years ago, this would have alarmed me – but now I no longer worry. I embrace days like this. Because an obscure idea I discovered in a work of medieval theology has taught me how to relax.

如今，“拖延”（这个P字）名声不佳。心理学家将其与焦虑加剧、自尊下降和抑郁联系在一起。而各种杂志（比如我刚刚按日期整理好的一叠）上，常常出现诸如“立刻停止拖延！”这样的标题。我是不是那20%“慢性拖延者”之一——那些一辈子倾向于逃避该做之事的人？如果是几年前，这个想法会让我感到不安——但现在我已经不再担心。我反而开始拥抱这样的日子。因为我在一部中世纪神学著作中发现的一个冷门观点，让我学会了如何放松。

For over a decade I’ve been researching the history of the seven deadly sins. This is the self-help system, devised in the Egyptian desert over 1,600 years ago, that claimed to identify the basic habits of the mind. It turns out that the medieval wisdom applied to these habits – pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony and lust – can be mapped on to the modern world pretty well. Studying pride taught me how to deal with narcissists, for example. But it was the fourth sin, sloth, that really opened my eyes.

十多年来，我一直在研究“七宗罪”的历史。这是一套源自1600多年前埃及沙漠中的自我修行体系，试图识别人的基本心理习惯。事实证明，中世纪关于这些习惯——傲慢、嫉妒、愤怒、懒惰、贪婪、暴食和欲望——的智慧，与现代社会有着惊人的契合。例如，研究“傲慢”让我学会如何应对自恋者。但真正让我大开眼界的，是第四宗罪：懒惰（sloth）。

ART·媒

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