“Keep My Hand From Striking” and Other Exercises of Self-Control

 

“…and he that ruleth his spirit, better than he that taketh a city.” — Proverbs 16:32

Self-control is an overlooked virtue it seems, especially in an indulgent culture. It seems it also comes in the positive and negative forms. First, the negative. Self-control as resistance to one’s own worst impulses. (Note: names changed to protect the guilty and less-than-innocent)

I.
Scott Krewett was a fireplug of a man: A wrestler, powerlifter, and some time soccer player, capable of putting men a foot taller than he on the ground and springing over their twitching frames to lunge at the ball. In our fraternity, he was the only man who had actually crossed the street and jumped into a stranger’s convertible just to settle a fight with a loudmouthed DePauw fan during rivalry week. He also jumped out of the car when the Danny loudmouth peeled away, escaping with only minor road rash, and a big smile on his face as he ambled bleeding toward the house.

“Bet he won’t try that crap again,“ he said with obvious satisfaction. “Hell, bet he sends me a bill for cleaning the leather, the mama’s boy.“

All this just made the events one spring day in 1991 all the more surprising. Like most fraternities, mine had a charity committee, which had developed a long-standing relationship with the Boys and Girls Club of Crawfordsville. That year we were hosting a day in the park with the kids, with games, snacks, and general child-friendly conviviality. There was one kid in particular, a lanky 14-year-old who was exerting his best efforts to get on all our nerves in spite of our best efforts not to let him. We’ll call him Larry for the sake of the narrative. Larry had been pushing some of us, stomping on our feet, and generally physically harassing each of us over the course of the day. The grating part was that he obviously enjoyed trying to goad us into hitting him. Everyone had taken it pretty well, except for Bill and Carlos, who had yelled at him and then had words with the adult supervisors from the club.

“I know,” Jane the Director had told Carlos, “we’ve tried everything to keep him under control, and, frankly, today is good. For him.”

“Can we ask you not to bring him next year?”, Carlos asked. “If he’s still with you that is, and not in prison.”

“No, we can’t really sort kids out like that. It defeats the purpose of the organization. Our aim to help them cope with their challenging life situations and channel their aggression positively.”

“Then would you aim him somewhere else? Keep him away from me for the rest of the day, at least!“ Bill snapped. Then he muttered. “Or I will not be held responsible for my actions.”

Jane just smiled at Bill. “Your organization signed up to work with our kids. We expect you to keep your word, and to show them patience and kindness. Most of them do not see those from the adults in their lives. You are an adult, aren’t you, Mr…”

“De Vries,” Bill said, looking appropriately chastened.

“Well, Mr. DeVries, you’ve only got about five more hours. I think you’ll make it.”

Bill and Carlos and the rest of us did have to put up with Larry just a while longer … and that’s where Scott comes back into the story. The last event of the day was a touch football game, Club Kids vs. Frat Men. It went well, all things considered, until, on the last play of the game, football degenerated into a disorganized roughhousing match. At one point, Scott was wrestling with some other kid and Larry, from about thirty feet away, took a running start, leaped in the air and hurled all of his weight down on Scott’s back, jamming his elbow into Scott’s shoulder with all the force he could muster. Surprisingly, he rebounded off of Scott like he’d hit a brick wall and landed on the ground. Scott stood up and rounded on him. The look in his eyes was purest murder. For a second, I pictured him beating Larry straight into the hospital, not without some satisfaction at the thought, I must lamentably admit. Instead of swinging at the kid, Scott extended his hand.

“Are you all right?“ he asked. Larry just looked at him blankly, stood up and ran away without a word to begin tussling with some of the Club Kids.

“Wow, Scott, for a second or two I thought you were going to kill that kid,“ Carlos said.

“For a second or two, so did I.”

“So what stopped you? The thought of a lawsuit?“

“No,” he replied. “The thought of what it would make me — and him — if I did. I could have whaled on him, sure, but I think he gets that at home. To keep my hand from striking a kid who was just trying to get the attention of the safe grown-ups, and doing that badly all day, well, that tells a better story than the one he’s growing up with.“

Carlos nodded and we all left the incident behind, but I think everyone who saw it had a different view of both Scott and a different assessment of their own maturity.

II.
Then there’s the self-control in the single-minded pursuit of a goal, something all of us have had to learn and exercise. Some just learn it earlier than others.

Steve was — what do you expect — the opposite of Scott? Not exactly. He was quieter, that’s for sure. He was also taller and had been forced our freshman year to become a much less athletic young man than he had been in high school. It had been a regular ordinary football scrimmage and he had gone down hard on tackle and not gotten up. He said he couldn’t move his legs and he was right. Practice was halted and Steve was taken to the hospital with what turned out to be a bruised spinal cord.

“I didn’t know that was even possible at the time,“ he told me months later. But it was. Thankfully with bed rest and medication, he recovered with no real permanent damage. Except for the diagnosis that one significant contributing cause to the incident was that the tube in his spinal column, through which the spinal cord passes, was unusually narrow. Another hard throw, even a fall, any sudden application of excessive force to spine could result in permanent paralysis. Physically hard sports of any kind were out for Steve from age 19 on. And he had to be on medications for pain for months afterward.

He hadn’t come to college to play ball, though. He had come to study biology and chemistry en route to medical school. Steve was the frequent absence from house parties and social functions, and often came in from the library at 11:30 or later. The wall over his desk was plastered with anatomical diagrams and terminology lists from the latest round of exam material. It wasn’t that he had no hobbies or anything. He played guitar passably well and built his own Stratocaster look-alike from scratch, not from a kit. He made or bought each piece individually, carved the body and the neck himself, installed the pick-ups, did all the wiring and built a perfectly playable instrument. That wall of study materials over his desk was opposite a wall that was covered with posters of Steve Ray Vaughn, Jimmy Hendrix, and Vernon Reid.

Still, I wondered about the amount of stress he was putting himself under, and what we now call the “work/life balance” that Steve was maintaining. So, one night while working on a paper for Cultures and Traditions using his computer (I did not have one at that time), I decided to play Devil’s Advocate and ask about it.

“So, Steve, don’t you think you could let up a little bit? I mean, part of being in a fraternity is participating in the social life,” I began.

“I’m the chapter historian,” he replied. “And I was the bartender at the formal two years running. That’s participation enough, I think. You know, John, I’m not like Earl or Jim. I don’t have a photographic memory. I have to study to keep my GPA up, to keep my scholarship. They can afford to blow off to the last minute.“

“You could show your face a bit more, I think, without jeopardizing it. It might do you some good.”

“And it might not. I might find out I like it too much. I’ve got a goal, that I’m not willing to risk. I’m going to finish and I’m going to be a doctor, and unlike some of our friends, I’m not going to let my major be stupid undergrad tricks.”

Pleased with his response, I let the matter drop after that. We did hoist a couple of shots after finishing our papers, but the work came first for him.

His kind of dedication to a goal was not new, of course, but in context it was remarkable. Steve and I were surrounded at college by people with more talent than sense, and a healthy dose of his self-control would have saved their academic careers, and they might have actually realized the goals they had come into college with.

III.
The phrase “wise restraints that make men free” is more than a line from a famous plaque hanging in the Harvard Law Library. It touches on the freedom that comes from our self-restraint, freedom that is borne from the exercise of control of the self, both in the negative sense of restraining destructive impulses and the positive sense of harnessing one’s vital powers toward long-term goals. In that, we are freed from the consequences of our own rashness and cupidity and freed into fulfillment of our true and chosen purposes.

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  1. Hartmann von Aue Member
    Hartmann von Aue
    @HartmannvonAue

    And look at that- a mere 8 hours past deadline. 

    • #1
  2. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Deadlines. I love the whizzing sound they make as they sail by.

    I was the “academic lifeguard” at my fraternity. The powers-that-were would assign me to room with the pledge judged “most likely to flunk out.” I tutored in whatever subject they were dragging in. Mostly, this was either physics or chemistry, though there were a few that needed help with rhetoric.

    I only had one failure. The boy just couldn’t apply himself. He had an inability to just buckle down when he heard the siren’s call of social events.

    • #2
  3. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Percival (View Comment):
    I only had one failure. The boy just couldn’t apply himself. He had an inability to just buckle down when he heard the siren’s call of social events.

    Was his name Percival?

    • #3
  4. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Arahant (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):
    I only had one failure. The boy just couldn’t apply himself. He had an inability to just buckle down when he heard the siren’s call of social events.

    Was his name Percival?

    No. I got myself over my early difficulties by myself.

    • #4
  5. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Learning self-control and to channel negative emotions into positive results used to be the difference between being a man (or even a gentleman) and being a cad or a bounder.


    This conversation is part of our Group Writing Series under April’s theme of The Course of Wisdom. If you have a few stories or tall tales to contribute about gaining wisdom, or maybe of where someone didn’t, we still have a few openings on our sign-up sheet. Why not help others to learn second-hand since first-hand learning is often painful?

    • #5
  6. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Arahant (View Comment):
    Learning self-control and to channel negative emotions into positive results used to be the difference between being a man (or even a gentleman) and being a cad or a bounder.

    Or a poltroon. Or a knave. Or a cox-comb. Or a hedge-born churl…

    • #6
  7. Hartmann von Aue Member
    Hartmann von Aue
    @HartmannvonAue

    Percival (View Comment):

    Arahant (View Comment):
    Learning self-control and to channel negative emotions into positive results used to be the difference between being a man (or even a gentleman) and being a cad or a bounder.

    Or a poltroon. Or a knave. Or a cox-comb. Or a hedge-born churl…

    Or craven dastard, or scapegrace, or egg, or blackguard….

    • #7
  8. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Hartmann von Aue (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):

    Arahant (View Comment):
    Learning self-control and to channel negative emotions into positive results used to be the difference between being a man (or even a gentleman) and being a cad or a bounder.

    Or a poltroon. Or a knave. Or a cox-comb. Or a hedge-born churl…

    Or craven dastard, or scapegrace, or egg, or blackguard….

    But enough about my family…

    • #8
  9. Hartmann von Aue Member
    Hartmann von Aue
    @HartmannvonAue

    Percival (View Comment):

    Deadlines. I love the whizzing sound they make as they sail by.

    I was the “academic lifeguard” at my fraternity. The powers-that-were would assign me to room with the pledge judged “most likely to flunk out.” I tutored in whatever subject they were dragging in. Mostly, this was either physics or chemistry, though there were a few that needed help with rhetoric.

    I only had one failure. The boy just couldn’t apply himself. He had an inability to just buckle down when he heard the siren’s call of social events.

    I know the type. They were frustrating to deal with and even more frustrating to be friends with. It galls me to see people drink or toke away their talent. God gave them that and was not meant to be wasted. 

    • #9
  10. GLDIII Reagan
    GLDIII
    @GLDIII

    Referencing section II and III, this little expose’ of college campus life is why I offered to float the boat for my boy’s education, but they had to live at home. Far too many distractions on the tender, unfocused 18 year old brain can derail the first few years of a rigorous degree program (ie one that can pay a decent living).  In hindsight I did not think I really missed anything when I review all of the non completions of my peer group who decide the frat life was the reason for college, and are now reluctant to share their life accomplishments at the reunions.

    The more I observe of what is happening at colleges with the unchecked cost growth and indoctrination aspects vs wisdom of the ages, the more I think there is a tremendous untapped market for online education destroying the hidebound academies of leftism.  The world is far too competitive for them to continue to destroy our country with  angry tribalism, since they have failed at the original charter of a truly liberal education.

    • #10
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