Life on Deadline

"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

 --Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

Thank god for deadlines.

Seriously. Where would we be without them?

A looming deadline may have been the final push to prompt our elected representatives (Am I the only one finding that word uncomfortable of late? Representative? Um, whatever. Just saying.) to pull their collective heads out of whatever dark place in which they have shoved them. It’s hours before the literal 11^th hour as I write, so it does remain to be seen, I suppose.

Clearly though, the deadline is something in which we place our faith. A government shutdown. A looming debt crisis. And yet, the markets continue to function with no significant indication of impending catastrophe. Most of the commentators acknowledge that things will get done “at the deadline.” “They always do.”

America is indeed a deadline-based culture. “What’s your deadline?” “Tell me your absolute latest…” “When do you gotta have it?” Because… you’re sure as hell not getting it five minutes before then. The deadline. For even the most cautious among us, it’s the edge we live on.

I remember a job interview from my younger days. The old guy in the room was asking about deadlines, and how I would deal with the staff in that regard. Certainly there would be special accommodations, he seemed to suggest. I smiled and talked about the difference between “deadlines” and “drop deadlines.” One I could control, one I could not. It must have been a good enough answer. I got the job, and we were pals my three years there.

At times, I can’t imagine what we would get done without deadlines. I’ve laughed and called myself a deadline girl for years. As far back as college, the deadline needed to be in my face before it had much effect. It’s not for two days, and you’re asking me about it now? The hell? On occasion I’ll open a file and find that I’ve taken care of something way in advance, far, far from the deadline. It always surprises me.

Looking at the productivity that bursts forth at the deadline, I wonder what we might do if life had a deadline.

It does of course. Death is always looming. As the economist John Maynard Keynes said, “In the long run, we are all dead.” But we sure don’t live that way. There’s a lot more Scarlett O’Hara in us. “I’ll think of it tomorrow. After all, tomorrow is another day.”

I’ve never had the urge to jump on the DNA testing bandwagon. Surprise me, I thought. I don’t need to know what’s next. It always seemed there was something about knowing what was looming in the distance that might sully the blissfully ignorant present.

But what if we lived life with that deadline clearly articulated before us? The randomness of life might catch a few by surprise, but what of the rest? Some would try to cheat fate. Note to those few. Hubris fails. Don’t believe me? Read Oedipus. Some would never pay attention, perhaps never really believe the truth in front of them. But what of the rest?

How much better would we live our truly brief lives if the deadline were before us? You have two birthdays left. Two summers. One fall. Would our lives be more full? Would our procrastination be less? Or would the final, epic, spectacular burst come right before the deadline?

Because, of course, that’s what we live for.