I got the news today that I had passed my Stochastic Calculus III class, and this provided a very high degree of assurance that I was in fact going to receive the MS degree I set out to acquire almost 5 years ago. How do you stop fighting when it’s felt like nothing other than a constant battle to feel adequate in an academic institution? How do you lay down your weapon and revel in your siege when your body has accustomed to the persistent tension of unknowing as to when the end of the battle would finally present itself?
Mentally, I feel elated and filled with the knowing that my efforts have not all been in vain. And yet my body grips to the struggle as though it doesn’t know how to let go. It keeps wanting to climb even though there is nowhere to climb.
I’m reminded of the impermanence of our lives, how I will look back at times like these in a decade or two and want to experience them again.
I’m well aware that the completion of long struggles like these indicates a struggle that I cannot have again, and that my life has room for only so many of these struggles. My father said the other day, “there will come a time in your life when you will actually need to tryto make your life interesting, now interesting finds you.”
Perhaps my body is knowingly fearing a time when I need to consciously seek out struggles and achievement, and that time represents a fading of the time that I have left. How smart ouir bodies are…..