a profound digression

I wonder why I haven't bothered to go through the Answer Key for the first Reshuffling Test and find out how well, or otherwise, I performed on it. Maybe it's because I'm not so sure I did really well myself, or because I know that disappointment is even more bitter when you place your expectations too high. You fall from a greater hight that way, and recovery would correspondingly take longer -- which is least desirable if you need to start preparing for the next test right after the first is over. Which in turn means that you need to be in possession of the right state of mind. Which would be impossible to attain if you fell in your own eyes. Why not postpone the fall and the injury till you're through with all the tests? It sounds sensible enough. Ignorance is bliss, after all -- especially if you suspect that you haven't done as well on the first test as you previously thought yourself capable of. This way your performance on the next test would remain unaffected by any sort of feelings you are likely to have developed as a result of knowing your score on the first test. If you're disappointed by your score, chances are that you would be further demotivated.

It's only in books and in movies that you see people reacting positively to failure and vowing to do better next time and all that. The truth is that not all people can readily adapt to that excessively optimistic frame of mind. Not everyone can run faster after a fall. People are encouraged to react positively to challenges, to believe that nothing is impossible. But at what point exactly does this type of thinking change from a positive mindset into a delusional one? When we say "I can do this", does it mean, by an objective analysis, that we really can, or are we just deluding ourselves into believing something that was never true to begin with, convincing ourselves that we are capable of things that were couldn't possibly be capable of, just because someone, some enlightened person in some distant civilization, has shown themselves capable of it? Are all men really born equal, with the same abilities, characteristics, and intelligence? It's absurd to believe that every student in a class can do just as well as the one who does the best, and it's equally absurd not to believe that not every student in the class can do as well as him or her. It isn't only a matter of choice. It's not as easy as "If I choose to do outstandingly well on the next test, I will do outstandingly well." People who have achieved something have the most annoying tendency to denigrate the difficulties that others might have faced that prevented them from achieving the same thing, for the simple reason that they didn't face anything of the sort themselves. Maybe all men were born equal. But the problems they face and the faculties responsible for dealing with them were not equally disseminated.

Not all men can paint like Leonardo da Vinci; not all men can compose like Bach. If someone claims that he can, we don't regard him as the fruit of everything profound that our enlightened ancestors made themselves hoarse preaching: we regard him as someone in acute need of psychiatric attention. Talent doesn't refer to exceptional skills in only one, strictly defined, field. Different people are talented at different things. But in today's world certain kinds of talent get paid better than others, and since money is the ultimate goal of every man (no matter how much he claims to be detached from mundane affairs, or content with sitting under a tree all day and having coconuts fall on his head periodically), he is forced to direct all his attention to those fields, at the cost of having whatever talent he might have once possessed to fade to nonexistence. And this is the eternal, immutable truth of mankind.

Believe it or not, all of that was a digression -- from what, I can't remember. But I suppose it's immaterial now. Anyway, this entry doesn't necessarily reflect any of the problems I'm facing now, or have ever faced before. The generic references to people here aren't disguised references to me. I merely speak from the standpoint of one who observes too much for his own good, and ponders too much for anyone's good, and is ultimately aggrieved by what he has observed and pondered over.