What Every Human Longs For
You are sitting in an exam hall. Surrounded by wooden desks, you look around and see others are also sitting this exam.
The entire room is just desks and people: A classic scene you’re almost certainly familiar with. You hear pencils tapping nervously. Legs shaking incessantly. Pages flipping frantically.
Heads are dropping.
But you’re sitting there quietly, at peace. Because you can see through the paper.
You look to your left and see someone shaking their head with disappointment. You know the feeling: The feeling when something is just out of your reach. You itch forward your outstretched fingers, but the object won’t touch you. Regret fuels the motor that powers this oscillating head.
Regret over how you could’ve better prepared for what has now come. Angst over how things have turned out. Disappointment with yourself.
You now look to your right and see someone with a supple smile. You know the feeling: The feeling when things work out. Perhaps it was due to judicious preparations; perhaps you just got lucky. Regardless, one cannot help but smile.
Smile over the fact they’ve gotten something right. Pride over marks they’ll receive that their peers may not. Joy over how things have turned out.
You then look directly in front and see the embodiment of defeat. A person whose head is pressed down against the desk — the exam paper acting as the only cushion in between. Perhaps you know the feeling: Failure. Giving up.
Overcome with misery, the person in front of you knows this exam can only end badly. Whereas the person to your left is only encountering a difficult problem, this person has found only strife throughout. All the questions seemed to be difficult questions. So they put their head down; they wallow in misery.
A struggling person to your left. A smiling person to your right. A defeated person in front.
At some point, you’ve been all these people; in fact, you would cycle between these states continuously. When you were struggling, you hoped to be the smiling person. When you were defeated, you would also hope to be the smiling person (but wouldn’t mind settling for the struggling person).
When you were the smiling person, well, things seemed to be… good! But the smile is short-lived. It always is. And then you pivot to the other states of living.
Now, you’re sat at your desk in a state of peace that the person to your left, right, and front cannot understand. The smile you have is an inward one: A smile that, unlike the person to your right, won’t fleet. Won’t cause you to cycle through the other states.
What led you to exist in such a state? What did you realise?
You realised that every question on the paper is pointless. Getting them right, half-right, or wrong doesn’t matter. Because they’re all pointless. Because entertaining them is to forever enslave yourself to the cycle.
Like all the questions on the paper, all thoughts are pointless.
There is no need to feel any particular way about the events of your life.
Everyone is going to die here in the exam hall. Everyone is going to be answering questions until the day they die. So, why bother with the drama? Why remain enslaved to the cycle?
People will tell you to take joy in the questions you get right. Struggle through the hard ones — and if you still get it wrong — just take it on the chin.
Why? So you can keep going round and round? Do you really think that, through enough effort, you’ll get to a point where all the questions are easy and give you joy?
I’ll tell you a secret. When you feel like you’re nearing such a state — when you feel like you’ve finally found ‘happiness’ — you’re going to receive a sobering slap on the face.
You’ll look down at your exam paper and suddenly you don’t understand anything. The questions seemed to have changed.
But the cycle remains.
You may only sit in peace when you have seen through the exam paper. When you have understood the cycle for what it is.
So, what will you do now?
Whatever you want. You may create art. You may create your own questions and spend your life playing with them.
In bliss.
