Experience

Today is probably the 1000th time I'd felt the trouble of an idea or a thought process that came just about 10 seconds late. The post is not about the 1000th time, but about all of them. Ranging from an elegant solution to a problem that you realise just after handing in an exam paper, or a question whose answer becomes obvious to you just after you'd asked it to jokes in the middle of a conversation like this or an interesting thought that could've changed the route of a serious discussion.

Life is queer in the sense that you ought to learn atleast when you're doing something, if not before. The process of learning is skewed - unless you are given the ability to predict all possible situations which you will get into. But if you could actually predict that, well, you can do a lot better than just not making a mistake. And since there are infinite possible situations that you could get into, its not possible to predict and be prepared for all of them. So, in life, you're theoretically bound to make mistakes. This is not even getting into misjudgements and miscalculations.

So the most important thing is to learn from all of these and extrapolate these to many more so that the probability of doing a mistake decays over time. Maybe this is what they call as experience. Now, the best part of this experience is that it doesn't have to be yours - you could learn from others' mistakes as well, which is one of those nice things that give you a hand in avoiding errors. Fortunately/Unfortunately, as your experience gets aggregated, you stop making many trivial errors, which is good, but if you make an error is has huge effects. And as the story goes, unless you take time to sharpen your axe you aren't going to get better just by cutting more trees. The "silly" errors that don't affect anything drastically are the ones to remind you that your axe has to be sharpened.

I'm happy about most of those 1000 mistakes, I know I'm a much better person now because of them. The next time you make a mistake instead of feeling dejected, think about it - you'll be glad about it (in a weird sense) sometime soon. This, in my opinion is real experience.

Looking Back

There are only a very few times when I look back at my life, and wonder why I've been doing the things I'd done. I'm forced to go through the process now as I'm trying to draft my Statement of Purpose - The single most interesting part of any university application is the SoP, where you're given all the freedom you'd want to highlight your achievements, enlist your passions and even explain a few of your shortcomings.

I was quite excited when I began writing mine, and I filled nearly a page and a half listing things that I'd just done in my school days in less than ten minutes. There was a logical flow of things, and I knew exactly what to write about them. But the moment the chronology led to my college life, or even just the beginning of it, I fail to see any explanation. Weaving a story out of nothing is simple. But weaving a story out of mistakes isn't.

But now, all that I can say is this:
What I really love doing is X. But I got into doing Y just because of some Z. In my process of doing Y I stopped doing X. And now I want to do A because its the closest I can get to X. :-/
-- I'm not sure about the A part, but I'm pretty sure the XYZ part is true in varying orders for many of us.

Apart for the cliché it carries, "Life is too short to do things that you don't like doing" makes a lot more sense in retrospection. Of course I know its still not too late to make amends, and I'm not getting all emo here, but the crux of it all is just, (atleast as a note to self) - Don't let anything stop you from following your heart. It might not be immediately possible, but this is the ideal time to reflect upon the things you'd want to do and try to get to doing them as soon as you can.