Screwtape, Generosity, and Skating Backwards

One of the reasons C. S. Lewis is such a delightful writer is that he’s good at making insightful studies of a topic often treated with saccharinity or cynicism: how people think and behave when they’re trying to be good. He paints excellent portraits of intelligent minds trying to come to grips with how to be a good person and how to live a good life. One of my favourite bits is from his The Screwtape Letters, in which an older devil describes to his nephew the state of mind of a subject trying to be humble*.

Through the voice of Screwtape, Lewis shows a young man wrestling with the paradox that one cannot be completely humble so long as one is aware of being humble; he describes the way people sometimes mistake pretending not to know the extent of one’s own virtues with humility, and how the concept itself can chase even dedicated minds around in circles. “Hey, I really don’t feel like I’m better than everyone else for being able to do advanced maths or score goals or build a cabinet! … But wait, I kind of feel superior for not feeling superior… But noticing that shows how I really am putting all my effort into curbing my arrogance… But being proud of that makes me arrogant all over again…”

Lewis does, however, see a way out of this ouroboros attempt at self-improvement: in the end, the devil warns his colleague, make sure you don’t let the young man gain perspective and laugh at himself for expecting to be perfect. If he learns to accept the effort for its own good instead of finding all the ways he’ll never reach his ultimate goal, then chances are he’ll be able to overcome his self-consciousness through habit and attain what he’s seeking once he’s forgotten that he’s trying.

Now let’s take a step out of the brain of C. S. Lewis and into that of Lawrence Scanlan. Mr. Scanlan’s recent book, A Year of Living Generously, details the experiences of the author as he dedicates his time to volunteering with a different organization each month for one whole year. Lots of things to talk about with a project like that, but for the purpose of this article, I’d like to focus on just one aspect of the book: how reading it made me feel.

Scanlan raises a lot of complex questions, but one idea he reiterates from January through December is that the world needs more volunteers, whether it’s people advocating for the homeless at home or offering their professional skills overseas. There are plenty of places to disagree with him over what types of volunteering are useful, whether offering certain kinds of work is selfish, etc., but I think there’s less to disagree with in his core concept: if you encounter injustice or suffering, it is morally incumbent upon you to try to alleviate them. And, Scanlan suggests, the way to try is not to throw money at the problem — sure, donations are great, but often they’re a way to avoid confronting uncomfortable issues, like poverty or disability, and especially to avoid making contact with the people who face them.

That idea makes part of me squirm up in a mixture of shame and I don’t know what. Because the interactions Scanlan describes — listening to homeless men’s stories  in urban shelters, chatting with patrons at an affordable-cost lunch facility, teaching challenged children how to ride a horse — are all things I agree are some of the most important contributions one can make to society. They’re also all things I’ve never done. Things, truth be told, I’m scared to do.

But in fairness to myself, I’m not scared of those things because I’m scared of the homeless, those with less money than myself, or those with physical misfortunes. I’m just as scared of interacting with them as I am of interacting with other strangers I might chance to meet. I don’t enjoy talking to people, particularly strangers.  I like to be alone inside my head most of the time.

However, I also know that I’m not a generous person. I hoard. Given the choice and no stimulus for reflection, I will happily and selfishly salt away my time, money, and possessions, despite having no realistic reason to expect that I’ll need them.

So I find myself in a dilemma like C. S. Lewis’s would-be humble young man. On one hand, it would be shameful to skip out on my responsibility to other human beings because of personal discomfort and selfishness. On the other, forcing myself to do things for which I have no talent might be worse than doing nothing: for instance, an obviously fake pity smile can often be more hurtful than offering no smile at all. Back to the first hand, using such a thing as an excuse to avoid doing something I dislike is even more shameful than bowing out but admitting cowardice; back to the second, but insisting on doing things I’m bad at rather than trying to see the ways in which the things I’m good at might be applied is a waste of resources. And I despair of knowing which is my “real” motivation (if single such things exist).

But now let’s take a final step out of my head and back into my skates. Luckily, they have far less angst. This is possibly because they’re much younger, having begun to see real use only over the past year and a half or so.

When I was a girl, my parents signed me up for figure skating, which I hated, mostly because figure skates hurt my feet and probably a little because I’ve always been bored by sports without a direct competitive aim (e.g. where you don’t get to play against someone or a team of someones). Now that I’m a woman, I’ve decided that I’d like to learn to skate better so I can play hockey, which I enjoy.

I have no doubt that I’m the worst player in my casual pick-up group and one of the worst students in my power skating class. I can barely skate backwards or stop, stickhandling’s tough, and even when I know where I ought to be to make the play, I can’t get there in time. I fall down, teeter across the ice, and lag behind the other players as they zip to the offensive zone.

In my daydreams, I can zip around the ice like Wayne Gretzky or Bobby Orr, absently backwards crosscutting across my own end while paying attention to my teammates up in the offensive zone like it ain’t no big thing. In real life, after skating lessons, one and a half beginners’ hockey courses, and plenty of pick-up matches, I still can’t skate backwards much faster than walking. It seems like every time I painstakingly pick up something new (two summers ago, I could crosscut backwards), I lose it after about a month. And improvement creeps along at a snail’s pace: OK, now I’m bending my knees more. Now I’m making C’s with my blades one foot at a time. Now I’m remembering to practice whenever I have a chance.

But the thing is, even though I’m like 99% sure those daydreams are never going to happen, I still don’t feel like they’re completely out of reach. And I’m okay to keep trying, racking up practice little by little until I get just a tiny bit better than I was before. I’m not going to throw down my stick because I’ll never be a pro, or even because I suck. Because the effort itself is fun. I enjoy it. And even though I don’t know that I’ll ever be any good, I know that I definitely won’t if I don’t try.

So why should being a hockey player be any different than being a good person? True, the latter is more important. But isn’t that just more reason to try for even the smallest chance of success? If I looked a pro hockey players and thought, “Okay, first step: be as good as them,” I’d never have bothered trying on skates. Likewise, if I shoot for the very best behaviour I can imagine, no matter how different it is from what I’m comfortable with, I might just give up.

So baby steps. Push my comfort zone a little in the right direction as much as I can. Work on expanding myself at the same time that I try to figure out how I might be able to apply my other skills. And always accept myself where I am, but never be satisfied with it either. Because the worst thing that can happen is getting frozen in that Escher-staircase mindset, not doing anything because nothing seems like it will be ideal.

After all, compared to a backwards crosscut, how hard can acting ethically be?

* For Lewis, true humility is acknowledging the extent of one’s own abilities and talents, comparing them truthfully to those of one’s fellows, but nevertheless not indulging in the sense that they somehow makes one “worth more” than other people, because skills and dispositions are not earned through individual merit but are rather gifts bestowed by the grace of a Christian Deity. Although for obvious reasons I disagree with the last part of this, for the purpose of this blog, I think there’s enough in common between our two understandings that the difference hardly matters.