"You'll do fine."

O, teach me how I should forget to think!
Romeo, Romeo & Juliet

Everyone's been telling me not to worry so much about my upcoming prelim exam and that I'll do fine. Even my advisor said so during our meeting today ..

.. so I suppose it can't hurt to listen. q:

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Thinking about it, worry doesn't really help very much. It didn't help, for example, when I was taking and re-taking my Analysis Quals during my first year.

To this day I think I was overworried about doing well, and after doing poorly once, I plunged into a vicious cycle of worry and fret and failure. I only passed Analysis when I didn't study too hard for it, and at that time I was focusing on the Topology Qual.

It could have been that measure theory and complex analysis had to gestate in my mind for that long (one year) before I could fully process that information and implement it in an exam. Nonetheless, the worry was of very little help.

Maybe my concern is complacency and laziness. One could say that I am a high-inertial person: if there is no push for me to do or act towards something, then I'll likely not.

I can think of countless times when I posited goals or plans one day and forget them after a day or a week. Completely ineffective and intolerable, that! What good is my word if it cannot be trusted, or my promises if they never bear fruit?

If you think me an idealist, I'd have to disagree. I'm not trying to be a moral person, but a consistent one.

I suppose this is really my attempt at making sure that I am not myself, or rather, not the part of myself that is fallible and inconstant. Said otherwise, perhaps I'm trying not to let my humanity get in the way of progress.

As for what that means, I don't know and I don't think I want to know, either. Let me worry simply about doing well on this prelim, and leave the philosophy to January when I have time to ponder it. \: