Learning in War-Time

In "Learning in War-Time" C.S. Lewis how we should live our life in war and if it should be much different from "normal" times. "The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Life has never been normal." We cannot wait around for life to be normal before we decide to follow God because normal will never come. There are things that we may die for in life but we shouldn't live for anything besides God because anything else is a waste. If we learn how to swim and save a drowning person and then go wait by the beach for someone to drown we would be living for that. It is better to just know how to save someone and then if you happen to be in a situation where someone needs help, then you can save them.

Lewis then goes on to list the three main mental enemies that war brings upon us. The first one is excitement. We get excited about the war and that is all we can think about and that makes it hard for us to get our work done. "The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they will seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable." In college there are a lot of things that can distract us; it might be a break that is coming soon, or a family member that is sick or injured. Although it is not bad to think about these things, we need to be able to focus when it is time to learn. The second enemy is frustration. If we procrastinate on a paper or project and wait until late the night before to start, it is easy to get frustrated and start thinking that you will never finish it. All this does though, is slow you down even more and keeps you from thinking about the job you need to do. The third enemy is fear. "What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 percent of us die." War should not make us fear death because it does not increase the chances and could actually give a less painful death than later in our life, so it is not pain that we fear. The thought of death is what we fear. We are always worried about staying healthy and looking good and we try to forget about death altogether. War makes us think about death which brings us fear. Sometimes we can just be so worried about our grades that we actually keep us from learning be cause we are so worried about how to get the best grade rather than how to learn the best. The enemies of wartime that Lewis lists are not just in war but at all times because life is never truly normal.