Good news, friends -- I finally filed my tax returns! The seven days I had to spare this year marks a career high, to the best of my recollection. I’m super proud of myself, and I’ve decided to reward myself by writing a blog post and having a bit of weeknight whiskey1 (a rare occurrence ‘round these parts).
You see, for the vast majority of my life, I have been a serial procrastinator. When I was in college, I would often wait until the night before big papers were due and thrive off of the adrenaline coursing through my veins as deadlines approached to whip up something passable but mediocre.2 I am the king of *shrug* “Good enough.”
One of my favorite ways to kill time back in the day was by playing video games. I never quite got into the first-person shooters like Halo or Call of Duty because I was bad at them. My go-to game was always EA Sports’ NCAA Football.3 Beginning in middle school, my yearly back-to-school ritual included the purchase of two things: a new pair of shoes, and the latest version of NCAA Football. I would spend most of every fall racking up virtual championships and filling virtual record books. With each passing year, the developers worked to add new features to update the gameplay and give teenagers talking points when it came time to make their case to their parents about why they needed to buy the same game every August.
Warning, we’re about to enter some serious football geekiness here for a paragraph or two.
One of the most interesting features that was introduced along the way was a setting that affected how the play clock and game clock would run when your team was on offense. The standard setting ran off about ten seconds each time you huddled to call a play, but there were also “aggressive” and “conservative” settings. The aggressive setting basically put your team into an up-tempo, no-huddle offense that maximized the number of plays you could run. The conservative setting, on the other hand, made the play clock and game clock automatically run down to six seconds each time you broke the huddle and came to the line of scrimmage.The aggressive setting was helpful if you wanted to run up the score, or if you were trying to come back from a deficit late in the game. The conservative setting, on the other hand, was helpful if you wanted to use as much time as possible not playing football, most of the time because your team was leading late in the game. This tactic, which is known as “milking the clock”, is frequently used in real life late-game situations,4 and it was cool to have this bit of reality included in a video game.
The trouble with the conservative clock setting, though, is that you end up wasting a heckuva lot of time. It’s also really tough to switch back and forth between milking the clock and trying to score efficiently -- both in real life and in video games.5 Once you’ve adopted the time-wasting mentality, it’s pretty easy to get stuck there.
In video game football, wasting time is not the worst thing in the world -- though it pains me to admit it, none of the things that happen in video games are real or matter, like, at all. Wasting time is, I suppose, the general point of video games. But in recent days, I have noticed that I tend to put my actual real life in conservative clock mode.
Years spent perfecting the art of procrastination with Twitter, Netflix, random games on my phone, and taking naps have given me a particular set of skills when it comes to milking the clock of life. Whenever I’m stressed out, or don’t want to deal with a particular problem, I turn on conservative clock mode and waste time until I can busy myself with something else.
These distractions aren’t bad in and of themselves -- there are situations that undoubtedly call for Twitter and naps -- but when they become a means for me to try to escape life, I detach myself from the present. My old arch nemesis Screwtape has some thoughts about the present which seem relevant here:
The humans live in time but [God] destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things: to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which [God] has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present -- either by meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.Milking the clock detaches me from the Present -- from the nasty bits which cause stress and frustration, to be sure, but also from the good parts as well: from the Cross, from grace, from God. Sooner or later, I will have to re-engage with the Present, and all those things which I hoped to avoid -- taxes, lesson plans, blog posts, etc -- will undoubtedly be waiting there for me. There is no escaping the Cross, and thank God for that.
The motto of the Congregation of Holy Cross, the religious community that founded Notre Dame and various other schools throughout the country, is Ave Crux, Spes Unica -- Hail the Cross, Our Only Hope. Blessed Basil Moreau, the founder of the congregation, recognized the incontrovertible fact that the best thing about Christianity -- indeed, the thing about Christianity -- is the resurrection. Trouble is, at least for us weak-willed procrastinators, is that there is no resurrection without a crucifixion. And therefore the Cross, which on its surface appears to be a grotesque weapon of torture, execution, and terrorism, is in fact the only path to achieve eternal life, and is therefore the source of all of our hope as Christians.
The Cross with which Our Lord commanded each of us take up and follow him is, to say the very least, uncomfortable. If I imagine myself standing with the disciples and hearing Jesus’ exhortation to follow him in this way, my first instinct probably would have been to start playing Sudoku in the dirt. Sure, I’ll take up my Cross eventually, but first I really need to find out what seventeen different beat writers tweeted about the Cubs game today.
The all-important prelude to carrying my Cross and discovering the hope and grace that reside in it is to take it up, to exercise some fortitude when Netflix asks if I’m really still watching re-runs of New Girl, stop milking the clock, and live in the Present. It is only in doing so that I can hope to encounter the freedom promised me by Perfect Love.
1 Tonight’s spirit of choice: Not A King Whiskey, from Journeyman Distillery in Three Oaks, Michigan. Journeyman is a hallowed ground among my friend group, and this particular whiskey uses George Washington’s original mash bill from his private distillery at Mount Vernon. I can neither confirm nor deny whether I’m listening to “Right Hand Man” from Hamilton as I sip and type.↩
2 This is definitely also how I write lesson plans and blog posts. We all have areas for growth.↩
3 The NCAA Football series was discontinued in 2013 as part of the NCAA’s ongoing moral quandary about using the likenesses of student athletes to make stacks of cash without paying the same student athletes who were generating all the income. Yet another reason the NCAA is trash.↩
4 Or, if you’re Kirk Ferentz and my childhood favorite, the Iowa Hawkeyes… for entire games. Because Ferentz and Iowa are both extremely and endearingly boring, and in both cases your best option is often to do absolutely nothing for as long as possible.↩
5 There’s another version of this clock-milking strategy in basketball, which I almost used as the central example. Teams who lead late in games will often abandon the strategies that gave them the lead, and adopt a stalling tactic known as “four corners,” where four of the five players literally go stand in separate corner and generally stop doing anything that resembles playing basketball.↩
No comments:
Post a Comment