Worry time. That’s the favourite time of the worrying student. Will I fail? I’m definitely going to fail. Can I study all of this before the deadline? Of course you will not. How can I face my friends after failing? You will be known as the loser who failed.
Those are the favourite questions and answers of our monkey mind. Do they do any good? Of course not. What it does well is, creating a future which hasn’t even happened yet, in the darkest possible manner. The monkey mind is doing his job well. Now we will think this is not going to be worth it, I’m going to fall on my face. Maybe I’ll need an extension. Maybe I’ll do the exam next year. Hooray! See, I save you. Now we don’t have to stress about exams, now all we need is a good lie to tell others and ourselves, too. Now that I have more time, we can enjoy the finer things of life. Let’s play Call of Duty with our gaming-friends. Let’s watch Peaky Blinders again (I’m planning to do that when they announce season 06 is going to be released).
All of that is if we go over a cliff. Now, if we are studying for the exam or doing the project because we have to finish by a certain date, the worrier (not the warrior) in us is going to keep us busy by taking a lot of time for his priority: worrying.
All in all, worrying is needless anxiety. And all anxiety is needless. It’s fake, it’s a lie. Created by our old monkey mind. By our resistance. Anxiety doesn’t protect us from danger. (Unlike fear which brings us danger: about staying alive, feeding your family, avoiding tigers.) Anxiety keeps us from doing great things. It keeps us awake at night whispering about a future that’s not going to happen.
Pragna (it’s a Buddhist term) is the opposite way of seeing. Pragna is seeing the world as it is. Free from our emotional attachment. Pragna is understanding the true nature of phenomena. Pragna is understanding that worrying is a worthless activity. And converting that time (our most precious resource) into something that is meaningful to attaining our goals. It means stop spending time worrying and convert that time into studying. Because if you continue to do that, and just that, by the end of the road you would have accumulated a completed piece of work. A completed work means we have studied every possible thing to the core and we are comfortable with the subject. Now, we have no worry (of course we might still have a bit of doubt, but we know deep inside we have done the work) in facing the exams.
Study updates: yesterday our Case Study classes commenced. Zoom Live classes are good. But I almost napped during the session. And I proudly say, I managed to make a lot of progress with my work. I didn’t waste time.
Pasindu's Blog 