Virtue Quest

You just can't stop!

You do remember Tetris, don’t you?

Of course you do. Those blocks keep coming, faster and faster… at a certain point I would just give up and let them stack like a skyscraper. But apparently there were Tetris experts who could play for twelve hours straight! Cuh-ray-zee.

So I was thinking about how to explain the process of building a habit, and it was Tetris that came to mind.

The blocks don’t stop!

In real life, as in Tetris, new situations keep appearing and they have to be fit into life as it is, whether we like it or not. There’s no choosing what shows up on the horizon. And there’s no stopping it. Life will keep coming at us, at a steady pace of twenty-four hours every day, for the rest of our lives.

But, there are ways to deal with it, to keep from being overwhelmed, even to use the strangely-shaped situations that life throws our way to the good. It’s like clearing a line in Tetris: when we arrange the different parts of life into the proper order, they cease to cause problems.

And, as we practice arranging our lives, we get better at it. Maybe we even begin to see new “problems” rather as “opportunities” to fill a gap, or to discover a new way of ordering life.

Perseverance is a virtue

Now, I’ve already mentioned that, in playing the game, I eventually give up out of frustration. I have to admit that I’m tempted to do the same in my life. I have friends who always get going whenever the going gets tough. I admire them tremendously. For myself, I tend to avoid the situation, to procrastinate, or even to hide.

That’s because, at root, I’m basically a coward. And perseverance is a kind of sub-virtue of fortitude. It’s the courageous act of facing every obstacle as it comes, no matter how many obstacles there are. It’s the refusal to surrender in the face of ongoing adversity.

Growing in perseverance

So here’s what I’m doing to overcome my cowardice: I’m setting a schedule. I’m pacing myself. I’m writing a to-do list, and putting the tasks in order of priority. In short, I’m taking a little time to strategize, to arrange my life as it exists, and to plan out where those incoming events can fit into it.

But just as importantly, I’m giving up the fantasy that someday it will all become easy. I think that’s the ultimate root of my fear: I think that life ought to be easy, and I’m frustrated when my dreams don’t arrive on a silver platter.

That is a lie. It’s time to face the fact that, whatever I might want, life will keep coming at me. I can’t put the game away; it’s not a game. But I can start looking at life as a series of opportunities rather than as a series of problems. I can look for how new situations can fit into some kind of order – even if it’s an order I hadn’t planned on.

If you want to find new ways to bring order to your life, too, please join the quest for virtue! We can learn from each other, and grow together!