We all have those days; when we wake up feeling blue and know that nothing will go right and it doesn’t. Fortunately, for most of us it only lasts a day. Otherwise there would be so many more candidates for that hospital out at Canje; you know it.
As fate would have it, those are the days we will remember or come across the genius who has three degrees at age 30, or the one who is reading for a PhD at age 23. They stir up something inside you that momentarily questions what in Jack Frost’s name you have been doing with your life all this time.
Academic excellence is something most of us crave, but we cannot all be straight A students. And frankly what is so wrong with that considering how we are individually blessed with at least one special skill. It is almost a known fact, that mathematics as a core subject in schools can only be fully comprehended by a select group of persons.
We are not in that group of elites and make no bones about that fact. You know these things when you are a fairly intelligent young person doing well in other subjects but simply cannot understand matrices. Oh, how we hated matrices! And all that stuff about trigonometry, why must we do that?
But sometimes when the feeling of underachievement overcomes you, the nightmare that was mathematics while you were in school becomes a part of your introspection. What if you had applied some discipline to the subject and committed yourself to understanding it, would that consciousness have shifted to the academic choices you made later on? Maybe you could have had three degrees by now.
But then again, why three? Why not be happy with one and find gratifying employment, where you can fit into a few social circles and have a chat about US President George Bush’s misguided reasons for going into Iraq, but would prefer to sit and talk for way much longer about that guy who threw his shoes at him.
Hey if a US presidential candidate running on the Republican ticket had trouble comprehending a question about what the Bush Doctrine entails, who’s to know. Maybe it counts for something that we understand it to mean American hegemony and unilateralism, as well as that it promotes the idea of preemptive strike. Not bad huh? All due to a little hobby we have called reading.
It is not always about the certificates that we accumulate over the years but how much we have actually learned in those years, perhaps clichéd but its true. It is also true that some of those same people with their multiple degrees also have multiple issues, and I don’t mean the ones you can fix with a pep talk.
Who is there to tell us that if we are baking bread, sweeping the pavements or typing away at a computer in an office that we are not all the same. If we work as hard them we have something in common. The guy with the three degrees will still need the guy with perhaps just the technical know-how to fix his pipes when they go bad in his home. And the plumber who shows up may just have basic on-the-job training. (thescene@stabroeknews.com)
