The Examination of Life

"The unexamined life is not worth living"  - Socrates

Reflecting on how sedate my life is nowadays, I thought of writing about a time when life was more turbulent and uncertain--the passionate days of my youth, especially my undergraduate days.

Poetry poured out of my soul then. I was always scribbling down verses which found some readership in a local tabloid. Those were days before Instagram and Facebook and had I been born later I probably would be attempting to find my niche among the Insta-poet crowd.

Recalling some of my juvenilia, I realized that I had been heavily influenced by the romantic poets like Shelley, Wordsworth and Byron and also modern ones like Dylan Thomas and Edwin Muir. 

I was an engineering student at a local university but I spent my days in the university library in the Humanities section, lapping up the literary treasures denied of me, growing up in a small town.

There were eagerness, passion, anger and loneliness mixed up in a potent brew which fueled my incessant scribblings. I was comfortable straddling the worlds of the arts and the sciences--being compartmentalized into any one area would have suffocated me. It wasn't my nature. Science and mathematics gave me the grandeur of vision; the arts, a sense of beauty that yearns for expression.

In the cold halls of the library, I read Kant, Aurobindo, Asimov (whom I found had a book of dirty limericks), the letters of Dylan Thomas and also books about movies. I remember enjoying one which analyzed all the movies of Stanley Kubrick. The wealth of knowledge did distract me from my engineering studies but I always made sure that I studied intensely before the final exams to get good grades.

Exams, which thankfully we only had to sit once a year were harrowingly difficult, not because the questions were tough but more because we did not know what were we supposed to know. I was not a good note-taker and unlike students today who have the luxury of being given lecture notes and Powerpoint slides, we had to make sense of the aimless ramblings of the lecturers--many of whom taught at their whim and fancy.

I could understand why some students were driven to the edge of desperation during exam season--there were always rumours of some poor soul in another faculty attempting suicide. The library would be filled to the brim the month before exam. One had to go early in the morning to book one's seat. Everyone had their favourite spot to study--mine was close to the philosophy section on the ground floor.

I did not feel any sense of accomplishment even after I had graduated with a good Upper First Class degree. University education was a bit of a letdown; the only consolation was the library where I saw how wide the world of knowledge was. It despaired me to know how much more I had to know to understand the world.

Thinking back, my life could have taken so many different turns but I chose the mundane one, gaining employment with one of the large multinationals where quite by accident I entered the world IT, because I was tasked with the job of managing a network of UNIX workstations. 

But I never had a sense of a career--a job was something one did to sustain oneself so that one could decipher the mysteries of the universe. Throughout my entire life, I had never made a move that I had thought would advance my professional career. The real meaning of life was always elsewhere. And this has been the recurrent theme in my life--from the turbulence of my youth to a temperate middle-age. 

One could say that I am unpragmatic and and unworldly. Perhaps so. But one thing I've realized is that one can never suppress one's true nature. I am comfortable living the life I choose. I could not have chosen any other path.

Facing examinations in university was tough, but to me life itself is one big on-going examination. The questions of this examination are posed by nature, and there are no correct answers. One just has to commit to one's chosen answer and follow its consequences. That to me, is the proverbial 'examined life' of Socrates.