Autofocus
Sean Moore
It’s never as simple as just pressing a button.
The middle of a semester is usually when the feeling hits. The lack of control over anything that happens during the day. The running from class to project meeting, to class again, to the library to start an assignment, to home for a minute only to realize there’s no food left in the house, back to the classroom one last time before heading home, for real this time, hopefully not spending the whole night catching up for tomorrow.
When everything is a project waiting to blow up, it’s hard not to become a demolition expert. How can you not come to love the rush of adrenaline as you finish something at the last minute – I know it’s not monster trucks or an NRA convention, but sometimes life can only be as exciting as finishing a paper on foreign trade policy minutes before it’s due.
Inevitably though, I do come to the realization that being suited up for defusing crises left and right is a sham, just a little bit of theater and drama that dresses up the fact that I’ve given any sense of control of what happens in my day. And once I realize that I’ve become an automaton, the real questions come next. What have I missed? What am I doing that I shouldn’t be? What if everything I am doing is leading towards the wrong thing? Have I eaten at all in the last two days?
High school, college – for better or worse, the first twenty-two or so years of our lives teach us how to sprint to the next deadline. Test next week, better spend the night before studying the facts and equations. Homework’s due today, so don’t forget to finish, or start it even, in the class right before it.
Real life – and let’s be honest here, I can only speculate because I’ve lived no more a real life than any other disillusioned college senior – doesn’t come at you with a stack of tasks to complete and semester-long work periods. Are you, am I, prepared to work for five years on a labor of love before it comes to fruition? Are we even truly prepared for anything longer than a week, or a day, or an overnight session spent in the library?
We limit ourselves with these short-term horizons. For the past four years, at the beginning of every semester, I remind myself of the importance of being planful, of the importance of preparing for the inevitable peaks and valleys in the amount of work there will be. And without a doubt, not a week later I’m barely able to keep five minutes ahead of what’s next. Homework assignments done left untouched for a week, before being hastily completed the morning before submission. Tests are prepared for by spending the night prior re-reading the auto-pilot notes scribbled down during the times I actually attended class. Papers and projects get lip service until there’s a looming deadline, in the name of needing “pressure” in order to get anything done.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that college encourages this behavior, but there are certainly exceedingly few consequences for adopting a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants attitude. forgive the narcissism, but anyone with a moderate intellect and a coffee maker can succeed with little more than the next day’s agenda. Spend the day in classes, and spend the night getting ready for the next day’s classes. Rinse and repeat.
There is no easy button for life. Nor is there some crystal ball for us to divine what one of the thousand things we could be doing at any one moment will pay off the most down the line. We don’t have the luxury of some algorithm telling us when the most important part of the picture is clear and sharp. We have to make that distinction ourselves
It’s certainly possible to sit back and be led, by the tasks before us, by the dates and times and events that show up on our calendar. But a great thing rarely gets its start by being pencilled in for an hour-long appointment, or by being assigned by a professor or manager. Great things happen when we take control of our lens and do some adjustments to get what matters into focus.
What do we really learn in college? I hear a lot of things, from a lot of smart people, and the best of them amount to this: college is a little badge you can wear that tells the world that you can, in fact, complete a project. It may not be a labor of love, or a labor at all, but it is four or so years spent working towards a singular goal.
Life’s tough, but even so, sometimes it’s better to take off the demolition suit and get a real grip on the world around you.