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Friday, April 21, 2006
Finishing (Again)
I decided to write a post about the idea of finishing strongly. As I tell my students, someone running a race runs through the finish line, not to the finish line. I decided to entitle my post "Finishing." Lo and behold, I found that I wrote on this exact topic with that exact title almost exactly a year ago! Here is a sample from that post:When I am driving long distances, I notice that the last hour feels much longer than the ones before it. The last hour is so exhausting that I always have the impression of just barely having endured the trip. Since this exhaustion happens on three-hour drives as often as seven-hour ones, however, it stands to reason that the problem is me. There are a number of psychological tricks people play to overcome this problem that I would do well to learn.
Perhaps one such trick is to think of advice that was given to us when I was on the track team in middle school: "don't run to the finish line, run through it." Similar advice is given to kids about running to first base, and the notion of "follow through" that accompanies every sport which swings something fits as well. The end is not the end of all activity, just the end of activity at its fullest.
These thoughts also accord with the idea of grace that I've mentioned before, namely, that being graceful means having more strength than something calls for. To fall down at the finish line might suggest that you've given it your all, but it also suggests that you took on more than you could successfully handle.
To finish without grace, to slow down before the finish line, demeans our accomplishment. Hopefully, we end matters with pride in what we've done, but it is hard to feel that pride when the end seems like such a burden. It is the wrong form of punctuation, or perhaps a lack of punctuation altogether.
Should I take it as a good sign that I think the same thing in the same circumstances? Shouldn't I have grown over that time?
Well, I don't think it is a sign of growth, but it had occurred to me that this metaphor of running through the finish line could be applied to our lives as a whole. Should we not finish life at full speed, at least as much as our enfeebled frame can manage? Put in this perspective, the answer is not so clear.
Montaigne, for example, finds it ridiculous that people conduct themselves in old age as if they weren't going to die:
I want us to be doing things, prolonging life's duties as much as we can; I want Death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening. I once saw a man die who, right to the last, kept lamenting that destiny had cut the thread of the history he was writing when he had only got up to our fifteenth or sixteenth king!
Furthermore, Montaigne sees old age as precisely the occasion for slowing down and reflecting on what has been done:
We have lived enough for others: let us live at least this tail-end of life for ourselves. Let us bring our thoughts and reflections back to ourselves and to our own well-being. Preparing securely for our own withdrawal is no light matter: it gives us enough trouble without introducing other concerns. ...It is time to slip our knots with society now that we can contribute nothing to it.
A difference, I suppose, between the end of the semester and the end of a life is that my students do still have work that needs doing in order to accomplish what they set out to do. The end is also a culmination, but this is not usually the way we think of a human life, especially in our time when there is often a long period between our most productive years and our mortal end. We culminate somewhere toward the end, and then live off of the capital.
Eddie 3:19 PM
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