Trees and Forests

University starts in about 20 days and I’m in no way ready. I just got my first e-mail about what books to buy, with the helpful hint that I might want to think about pre-buying and pre-reading.

The book I’m supposed to be pre-reading is a book about methods and statistics. Right now I can’t even generate the energy to read about stuff I /want/ to read about; how the hell do they expect me to find the drive to read about methods and statistics?

The first and foremost problem ghosting through my mind right now is still very much ‘how am I ever going to pay for all of this?’. I’ve told the people at work that I’ll have to go back to three days of work a week. My study will take four days. That leaves me zero days to raise extra money, and as things stand right now I will only be making just enough to cover my base expenses. No fat, except for the little bit of extra money I’m raising this month.

How can I be thinking about methods and statistics when that’s all hanging above my head?

What I really need is some kind of fund or scholarship to help me out, but those don’t come knocking on my door either. I have to go out and look for them myself. The people at the government department that help most students with funding (Except for me, of course) helpfully compared finding a scholarship like that to ‘finding a needle in a haystack’. Oh boy, oh boy, I’m really looking forward to that.

Am I whinging? Yeah, I’m pretty sure what I’m currently doing is whinging; but then I’m terrified. I’m scared of the years ahead, I’m frightened of the poverty, I’m worried about whether I can do the degree and I’m deeply concerned about what further snakes are creeping through the savannah.

I must say, the people around me have been really supportive and I’m incredibly grateful for that. As always, I wouldn’t have been able to make it without those people. They feed my soul, they nourish my willpower. They take my annoyance, my frustration, my fear and let it wash over them without a sound, without a complaint. I owe them big time.

Maybe one day soon I’ll be able to repay them. When that light’s there at the end of the tunnel I might have a chance to do something back that will make their lives better. Till then it’s just a matter of looking at my own two feet and willing them forward a step at a time.

Don’t look too far ahead, because you’ll lose heart. A book has chapters so that we have a feeling of progress, a journey has steps so that we feel we’re getting somewhere. Just like a piece of text without chapters, pages, paragraphs, lines or breaks we’d rather not begin, in the same way will power is all about looking at the trees and not the forest. Just doing that little step now and worrying about the rest of those steps only when this little one is done.

And of course wisdom is keeping track of the entire forest. The big picture. That’s why they call people with too much of the first ‘stubborn’ and too much of the second ‘hesitant’.

So what if you’ve got both? Are you then ‘stubbornly hesitant’?