About Face: Of Time and Theories
A chaotic senior year of high school and the end of the college admission process left me exhausted and somewhat devastated. I had high expectations, not unreasonably, had performed at my very best for four years, but ultimately was not accepted into the University of Pennsylvania. Having raked up an excellent SAT score and the title of salutatorian, somehow without my better judgment and despite my determined resistance, my hopes and my imagination slipped free and embraced the wonderful idea of studying at Wharton at the prestigious University. Rejection was neither a blow to my pride nor fuel for anger. I was simply lost. I can not say that now I have found my way, but I believe that nothing has been lost either. Sometimes I wonder how the idea of going to Wharton ever entered my mind. No doubt it was implanted there by my well-meaning mother or by my brilliant but over-achieving friends. Certainly, I could have never put it there myself. In fact, for four years I was so immersed in chasing some noble, but distant and foreign goal, that I never pondered how truly distant and foreign that goal was for me. This experience had not etched a newfound philosophy in my mind, as I have noticed that my best conceived theories have a peculiar way of distorting my perspective and eating at my happiness. With the benefit of hindsight, I see that I had not lived the life I would have wanted. Time, so fleeting and precious, is just better spent it seems doing whatever it is that you want to do. Consciously making an effort to unearth what it is that I want, I have found myself in the company of better people, exploring interests that I never thought I had and finding more time for reflection, which still poses a small threat of producing those ‘well-conceived’ theories.