Survival Guide

 

As I write this mid-April, the weather and foliage outside my office window more closely resemble mid-May.  For many reasons, this school year in particular seems to be inordinately long and the remaining month especially excruciating to ponder.  I would be grateful to hear not everyone is in my shoes, but year-end projects, athletic competitions, and the host of other end-of-school activities on the horizon probably means you share my sentiment.  So, my advice is to press on.

 

In the classic 1993 film Rudy, the title character, Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger, has one goal:  To play football for the University of Notre Dame.  When he finally gets to the point where the dream feels just a little too far off and he doesn't make the “dress list” for a game late in his senior year, he tells his friend Fortune about his plans to hang it up. 

 

Rudy didn’t have the grades to even get into Notre Dame, so he spent two years at the nearby Holy Cross Junior College building a resume to gain academic acceptance – then he had to work his way onto the team as an undersized junior walk-on.  My love for this movie outweighs questions about its fidelity to the historical events.  There is one interaction, in particular, that helps me to reorient my thinking and encourages me to press on:

 

So, I don’t have a survival guide so much as an exhortation to reframe the goal.  The process required for Rudy to dress for one game and run out of the tunnel onto the field was better than his goal.  In this process, he gained more than the glory of one play on the field ever could.  Students, parents, teachers, and administrators are all tempted to quit this time of year – to see the next 30 days as mutually-served time before we get into the real act of living.  But, the time left in the semester is a beautiful time to go to practice.  We can hang in there with the greatest minds in history, aspire to synthesize all of the year’s learning into projects and papers, and walk into our summer of leisure, studier of soul and intellect than we entered the year in August. 

 

If this survival-turned-flourishing is still not convincing, let me appeal to Aristotle–by way of Don Haskins, legendary coach of the national-champion Texas Western basketball team and depicted in another sports classic, Glory Road.  When circumstances surrounding his upstart squad became tough enough to entice them to quit, Coach Haskins delivers the memorable line, “You quit now, you'll quit everyday for the rest of your life.” 

 

Quitting can become a habit.  Someone who always stops a few steps short of the finish line, leaves the last few chapters of a book, turns in homework assignments a few questions short, or phones in the last few weeks of each semester has made quitting their ethos. 

 

Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name (ethike) is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word ethos (habit).¹

We strive to do more than survive these unseasonably pleasant April days.  Whether it’s classic sports films or the Nicomachean Ethics that can stir our souls to reframe the goal, I contend that this month is the one that will most profoundly produce intellectual and moral virtue in us.  Press on, because in the experience and time of this final chapter we will not only attain intellectual virtue, we will form an ethos to flourish in all seasons.

 ¹ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, (Translated by W.D. Ross), II, 1.