The past month has seen what was normally an unscheduled schedule morph into a monotonous routine of brain force-feeding. It was difficult at first; the transition from living a life enriched with creativity and spontaneity was abruptly replaced by that of a storage vessel. A really dull one, ineptly moulded from the clay of somnolence and dreariness.
The contents of this pathetic excuse of a container were even less impressive, being only consistent in inconsistent practicality. Is the coagulation cascade going to feature in my life after this exam? Is this picture of a pseudo-gaucher cell really that relevant to my life? Probably not but I must stuff it in anyway.
The price of this enterprise is the formation of a creative vacuum. Your imagination, once a kaleidoscope of ideas is replaced by a psychological wasteland. This desert is now the definition of your existence. You begin to 'revise', to take in the obligatory information. You add more sand to the desert to make it sandier than it already is. Look! A cactus is beginning to grow. It is something fairly creative that has percolated through from your pre-exam life, here to distract you. You quickly douse it with as much sand as you can.
Exams finish, and it feels strange. All those things you looked forward to doing after exams have stopped being as exciting as they used to be. You had convinced yourself that post-exam feelings would feature pure elation. Instead you are plagued with this anti-climatic sense of nothingness.
It is no surprise that you feel this sense of the 'non-sense'. A custom made desert still gravitates your psyche. The swathes of lectures you desperately force-fed yourself are now stagnating, smouldering and waiting for you to desperately evacuate them. You can't get rid of them though.
Like looking into a puddle to see the sky it came from, you look into your soul to see where it is hibernating. You muster all your strength to awaken your true self. You remember what it was like to generate ideas of your own. You dare to do the most creative thing of all : Be Spontaneous.
Then you succeed. Out of the aridity grows a vegetation of creativity. Your true self blooms and eventually overcomes the vacuum.
This post is a testament to spontaneity. It is evidence that I have finally traversed the uniformity of irrelevance that is exams. I refuse to succumb to the increasing monotony forced upon us.
I leave you with a quote from E.M Forster's 'The Machine Stops':
'You are beginning to worship the Machine,' he said coldly."
