Testing, 1 2 3

People around here hate and fear tests. I never hated tests when I was in school. I mean, I didn't like them or anything, but tests have the wonderful characteristic of finality. They're done when they are over, completely out of your control. This distinguishes them from papers, which are never done until you actually write them, and so I constructed my college course load around courses that had final tests rather than papers. (It should be noted that I got through my 4 years of college without turning a single paper in on time, so perhaps I'm not the best judge of the advisability of these things).

Thinking back on it, this really doesn't reflect well on my outlook at the time. Of course, I was 18, so to even refer to myself as having an outlook is probably giving myself too much credit. But what I mean is that I preferred to depend on outside influences to guide my life, rather than trying to guide it myself. This ultimately led to my college graduation being like the final scene in The Candidate, where Robert Redford, originally selected to run for office because they couldn't find anybody legit to run against and opponent who seemed unbeatable, actually wins the election. He's sitting in the back of a limo with his advisors, with his supporters roaring approval outside and he looks at his manager with a stricken look on his face and says, "Now what do I do?" Except it's so noisy the guy can't hear him, so he mouths the question again, "Now what do I do?" And that's how the movie ends. I still remember that lost feeling in the movie and my graduation.

I'm not sure that's the way you want your life to go necessarily. You can take a pretty winding path to get to where you want to go, as I did. But on the other hand, there's something wonderful about taking each day, each moment, as its own, without imposing some kind of structure on it. There's a great passage in one of the Pooh books (I was thinking of Pooh because, having mentioned that I'd once answered the question "Who would you want to play you in the movie of your life?" with Bugs Bunny, someone asked me today which Winnie the Pooh character I thought I was most like), where Piglet asks Pooh, "What's the first thing you think about when you wake up in the morning?" Pooh replies, "I think, what's for breakfast?" Piglet then says "I think, what exciting thing will happen to me today?" Pooh thinks for a moment and says simply, "It's the same thing."

It's one thing to embrace the moment. I understand that it's another thing entirely to embrace taking a test. And adolescents have a tendency to magnify the importance of these assessment points, none of which really make even a miniscule difference in the way the rest of their lives will unfold. However, the test will come and go, and you will still be here and you will still be the same person. If that's not reassuring in some fundamental way, you might reexamine the way you're approaching your life.

And, by the way, I don't think I ever saw myself in any of the Pooh characters, which is okay by me since I don't think the actual Christopher Robin (Milne) saw very much of himself in them either. I have, however, seen Christopher Robin's own stuffed animals, which were, and may still be, on display in a glass case in the children's section of a nondescript midtown Manhattan library. They look very much like the drawings in the books.