Unexpected Transience

At my age and position (I have no clue what that is supposed to mean), life's philosophies are more dynamic than one might expect or want them to be. This realization keeps dawning on me with some regularity nowadays. The thing is that I have not yet managed to find the philosophy which really "fits" and which "makes sense". So I just keep changing them as per my state of mind. So why do I feel like talking about this now?

Well, the reasons are two fold. A good friend of mine told me out of the blue yesterday, that my writing is really not half bad. It was a compliment, even though I may not be making it sound like one. I asked him the same thing I ask myself. Where am I going with my half baked writing "talent"? Then he pointed out that one of my illustrious seniors, who is more or less a literary genius, won a $1500 award for writing 18 limericks in Lewis Carrol's style. Now, knowing how much more well read, articulate and creative that individual is, I know I stand no chance of getting anywhere near him. But I still felt like at least putting a few words down, knowing that however badly I write, no damage is done, since my erstwhile regular readers (there were eight at the peak) are no longer such. For more about the illustrious senior, one is referred to his blog.

Now for the second. I had a midterm on Distributed Systems the other day, maybe a month odd ago. I was in a pretty bad state, because there was a humongous amount of material to cover (500+ slides and about 5 chapters from the textbook) and I had no clue how I would ever remember any of it. So, here I am sitting with the book at about 2 AM, with the exam scheduled for 9 AM. There was no way I was sleeping before 4 AM, so I was sitting there waging a battle with my seemingly inevitable fate. And as such things often do, the stress got to me and philosophy started pouring out. A sense of pain and simultaneously a counteracting, heady sense of well being that comes from being in a philosophical state of mind, from seeing the "bigger picture" and saying to yourself that this exam really doesn't matter.

So there I was, my mind racing with these all these ideas which really had the potential to change human thought the way we know it (yeah right!). I said to myself, "Screw the test, sit and write!". But my other self replied, "Don't be a stupid f***, study now, there is more than enough time to do it tomorrow".

Knowing how things work, I had woken up in the morning, given the exam which turned out to be just three generic questions for which I needn't even have studied, my sense of well being returned, and all the brilliant (??) ideas of the previous night summarily forgotten. So much for being the next Plato or Socrates.

Adversity forces you to look at answers to questions where none exist. Its a peculiar need of the human race, that for millenia we have been looking to resolve our existential conundrums. But there are a couple of things that I have been finding out in the midst of all the conflicting messages I have sent myself. One is to be good, unconditionally if possible. The qualifying clause is necessary because most times it is neither easy, nor pragmatic.

The second is to put people first. Nothing is more important in life than the people around you - family and friends, in that order. The most lonely person in the world is the one who has achieved all the success that could possibly be had, but has no one to genuinely share it with. The put people first credo comes from a speech by President Spanier of Penn State which you can find here.

Its shameful that I am personally not following a credo that I am advocating, but I am trying hard to. Somehow I see myself changing into an individual I never wanted to be - one who feels envy at the success of others instead of genuine joy, who sees other's failures as a validation of his own, who judges people without giving them a chance, and tries his best to be as dry as possible so that conversations end quickly.

And so I hereby conclude another rambling needless insight into my life and my thoughts. Some day, I keep telling myself, some day, I will think up of something interesting to write which does not feature my life's (rather drab) experiences! If you made it this far, well, you are either a little too jobless, or a little too much of a kunalophile (sic) !