Master Shifu's Test in Patience
These two months of my life have just been a lesson in patience. Four main things happened that made me realise that my life revolves around the principle of “the next big thing” or the next big event in my life that I look forward to, to drive forward and stay motivated to continue on whatever I’m doing. The first one was my third year end semester exams that happened till the 3rd of June, and trust me when I say they were a draagggg. We had days in between to study and the exams themselves were 12 hour, open-book essay type tests. Due to anxiety of performance on the day of the exam all of us used to sit the entire day trying to finish and revise our answers until the very last second and consequently burn out, which in turn prevented us from studying for the next exam effectively. This went on for about 12 days if I am not wrong, and by the end of it I was a zombie not by virtue of not getting enough sleep, but by virtue of having “overclocked” my brain for the first time and losing absolutely all energy after the exam season while constantly looking forward to the last date and time at which I would be free of using it and when the exams would have ended. After that, my family had planned a vacation somewhere, and the only relevant info that I’m gonna share here is that multiple cities in out itinerary could only be travelled between through cars. This brings me to my second test in patience – the sheer travel between the cities on our itinerary was about 8-13 hours long on an average. This meant long durations of time just sitting in the car doing nothing because I had already slept and had therefore nothing else to do except wait for us to reach the next city. I hate road trips due to 2 reasons – the long hours of uncomfortable travel (and by uncomfortable I mean not on a bed), and the fact that you literally cannot escape a situation where your car breaks down. Thankfully the second scenario never came into play in the vacation but the uncomfortable travel surely did. I quickly became the king of long hours in a car even though I still hated the car travel simply because I was forced to cultivate my skills of keeping myself occupied in cars for a long time very thoroughly. It made me realise that all I kept looking forward to, was the destination of the journey all the time.
My third test happened during my internship which was almost immediately after the vacation, because the place where I interned was the first 9-5 internship/job I had ever had in my life. Even though I got a lot of work done and never had “free” time, I still needed a break frequently from the mundanity of it all, and in all my breaks all I remember looking forward to, was going home and exactly how much time was left before I could leave the office at 5. Lastly, in addition to these short term tests of patience that had occurred in this short span of time in the summer, I had already been waiting, saving for, and looking forward to getting Kaedehara Kazuha in Genshin Impact since January of this year. That’s 6 months worth of grinding, pining, saving and hoping that I get enough primogems to guarantee a copy of Kazuha (spoiler I now have had him for a day and it was all worth it; he’s amazing), but again, the theme of this long term goal had been me looking forward to something; i.e. getting Kazuha.
Now I don’t know whether such an outlook of life is shared by a lot of people or not because I have met people who seem to think life is monotonous despite all the little things that might make someone happy and I have also met people who believe that life is what you make of it. I personally do not think into such things nor do I usually self-reflect because I prefer living in the moment and take what is being given to me, but this time, this pattern of longing was too hard to ignore and not reflect on. I do believe a lot of people function in this same manner as me, going through disproportionate hardships and annoyances just to reach or get, a time or an item, that deludes them into thinking that it was worth it. Either way, these short and long term goals are what keep me afloat in the sea of the unpredictable and frankly insignificant life of mine, and I like it this way because through this approach there will always be light at the end of the tunnel regardless of how long, or how narrow the tunnel is.
Just my two cents of this week, a proper faithful drifty ramble haha, hope you can gain something from this. I for one, learnt more about myself and I actually liked it so this was immensely helpful for me.
Alr, I’ll see you soon
~dw
