I overheard someone saying that exams were the worst thing
ever invented, and although on the spur of the moment, my mind strongly agreed
with her comment, in retrospect I’ve decided that they are not. There is a
whole other world which opens up when one writes exams – a world of work,
seriousness, stress and nerves, but also a world of excitement, opportunity and
a future. It’s ironic that during the hardest periods of our lives we seem to
find even more reasons to hope and believe, and a multitude of inspirational
reasons for not giving up. But when life’s going fine and dandy, we tend to get
bored and that is the moment when depression and indecision strike!
It is easier to choose the worst of three unappetising
options than the best of three exciting ones. When faced with a choice between
Bad 1 and Bad 2, I think the brain realises that either way something Bad is
going to happen, and makes its decision efficiently and accordingly. Contrast
Amazing 1 and Spectacular 2 and the brain goes into an excitable hyper-drive,
making a frenzied choice that always leaves the decision-maker wondering if the
other option would have been better. So when exams come around, it can be
concluded that it is easy to decide to get on with exams (Bad 1) instead of
failing exams (Bad 2), but once they finish it is painstakingly difficult to
decide whether to have a manicure (Relaxing 1) or a pedicure (Happiness 2).
The time spent in total solitude, when studying, can be
considered a time of introspection, a time to learn about oneself and to
meditate, and one will often find that it is during the period of the build up
to exams, and the time during exams, when one feels most philosophical and has
more profound thoughts than usual. With all these deep musings flying around
there is bound to be friction, because they will collide at some point, and
these collisions can, I believe, be held responsible for the majority of the
tensions and emotional outbursts that occur during the exam period. Imagine if
every person was digging far deeper into themselves than they had ever done
before, and possibly discovering things they didn’t necessarily want to – this
would lead to a few minor personal complexes, mild schizophrenia and a touch of
confused tension.
But none of this self-discovery and personal solipsism of
the soul would happen if exams didn’t exist. To be fair, some people think
deeply like that most of the time, and that’s why the world is as it is, but
envisage every person studying for and writing even just one exam brooding
about existence all day every day. It’s a kaleidoscopic thought!
Picture every person as a unique shade of a unique colour.
Each of these people is surrounded by an aura of their colour that imprints
itself on the atmosphere around it, in the air, in the wind, in the minds of
the people around it; and this fog of colour darkens and becomes more opaque as
the person gives off more thoughts, or thinks more deeply. So now each aura of
each person is glowing darker and darker than it did before, and this means
that whereas before all the aura fogs could exist in harmony, merging into one
another and blending to perfection as they morphed under other auras’
influences, now they refuse to be confined and redefined, and they jab against
each-other, their solidifying and condensing fogs unable to be changed by
another different foreign fog. This is exam mode.
So you see, exams can be both good and bad: they can bring
introspective tendencies to the shallow soul, deepening its
waters, but they can also cause consternation and conflict as people realise
that they are not who they think they are, and that other people might not
be who they once believed the other people were.
