The less obvious choice

Around this time yesterday, I made a decision that has been eating me up inside since. Writing about it is just an attempt to clear my mind of it and remind me of why I did what I did. 

Now this isn’t something most people would consider a big or important decision, but for me, it was. I was faced with two options - one of them involved not doing anything, hence I might as well say that it wasn’t a choice but a necessary outcome of the current situation. The second one was entirely different, opting for which would be an active, conscious decision on my part. It involved working very hard to achieve something that, were I not to make that choice, I would have gotten anyway.

Why then, might you ask, did I even bother to think about it? Obviously, it would be so much easier just to take something you’re being offered right away, than to go the long way just to get the same thing in the end. Why did I even think of it as a choice? Well, as Albus Dumbledore once put it, We must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy, and I did not believe the easier option to be right, at least for me.

A bit of context should be important here, I think. Exams had been cancelled for students everywhere, and most of the students - especially private candidates - had no choice but to defer their exams to a later series. However, the awarding body had announced a process of giving evidence-based grades to students, where they would not have to go through the examination process and would simply be given grades based on their prior performance. Most of the private candidates couldn’t avail this process, but as it happened, I had already appeared for my AS exams (first year of A levels) last year, which made me eligible for it. I could get grades based on my academic performance of last year - which was very good, by the way.

Sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? I wouldn’t have to study anything, wouldn’t have to go through the stressful process of giving exams, and best of all, could start university earlier. That’s what I thought at first too.

But the more I thought about it - and I did think about it a lot - the more I felt that taking the easier path would be a lie to my own self. A qualification is so much more than a grade, and while I did care about grades, were they all I wanted? I soon realized that I hadn’t decided to do A levels to get grades, but because I was interested in studying the subjects I had chosen. I enjoyed studying, and while aiming for decent grades was instinctual, what I really valued was the time I spent working towards the goal. I was reminded of a great quote I once read, that went; It is good to have an end to journey towards, but it is the journey that matters in the end. - Ursula K. Le Quin. And so, I did what felt right to me: I opted out of getting evidence-based ‘assessed’ grades, and decided to take the longer route towards completing my A levels.

And while Robert Frost may have been ironical when he talked of taking the road less traveled, I took the meaning of his poem in literal terms and actually decided to take the path that hadn’t been taken. I don’t think I regret it, really, but there’s a voice inside me that every so often mocks me for doing what I did. I know there will be implications of this decision, but I’ve decided that I would prefer those implications to the alternative.

There’s another thing that going through this whole decision making process has made me think about. For a lot of us, there is always ‘the next big thing’ to look forward to. Whatever we’re doing, we can’t help thinking and planning about what we’ll be doing after that. In my scenario, for example, while doing A levels I can’t help fantasizing about what university would be like. I think sometimes, we get so carried away in gaping at the next big thing, that we forget the thing at hand, in front of us, that we are doing right now. We fail to realize that what we are doing now is just as important, equally worthy of being done with fervour and dedication, as we believe the next thing to be.