Keeping Up… and Catching Up

We recall the often quoted comment of Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen: “Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.” One of life’s most discouraging experiences is to be always behind. Leaving things that might be done sooner, until just a little later, is a factor of unhappiness and failure.

This is evident in students who habitually leave homework too late and first pursue other pastimes and pleasures, and count on doing the essential things second who ignore the alarm just a little too long, who leave home just a little too late, and who, literally or figuratively, live life breathlessly trying to beat the bell and seldom arrive in time to be quite comfortable, or to seem settled or to feel prepared.

In the words of a wise educator: “It is easier to keep up than to catch up.”83 Cramming isn’t a pleasant pursuit. Nor is trying to do several days’ work in one. Loafing along and then trying to pour in, in one night, all the knowledge that should have been absorbed in small daily doses is always difficult and discouraging.

This is true not only of young people, not only of academic obligations, but in all of life’s many other matters: Leaving to the end of the year what should be keep up currently, leaving too late any obligation of life, is an uncomfortable way of living, and is hazardous as to the things both of time and eternity. There is seldom any real reason to suppose that what we ought to be doing now will be easier to do after we find ourselves further behind. There is seldom any experience to suggest that “sluffing” today and doubling the obligations of tomorrow will improve our future prospects.

To concur with the comment of the Red Queen: We have to run so fast to stay where we are. And to the student near the starting of school, and to all people at any point in life: “It is easier to keep up than to catch up.” There is no better time to keep up than currently, and there is little reason to suppose that it will be easier to do all at once what should be done in digestible amounts each day.

Repentance is a great and blessed principle (one that all of us have need of), and catching up is a kind of repentance. But better than repentance is keeping the commandments; and better than catching up is keeping up so that postponement and procrastination are not permitted to put an always uncomfortable penalty upon us.