Matters Arising

Hola beautiful people. Firstly, I’ll like to start by apologising for being absent from your articles yesterday, it was largely due to the fact that my phone was off for most of the day. And there was no power supply to charge the phone and even the little power we got wasn’t enough to charge my phone up to 1%. I had plugged my phone thinking it would charge and I didn’t know my charger had started keeping malice with my phone.

It was such that my phone was showing charging, but not actually gaining any battery life even though it was plugged for over 30 minutes. You can understand why that would be frustrating. It wasn’t until in the night when I had to use a power bank which belongs to a friend to boost the battery a bit and just immediately I turned it on, the light came on again and I even had to borrow a charger from a friend to charge my phone.

As at the time of starting this article, I am charging the phone and because I have to go to bed early so I can be up as early as 3am to prepare for the journey (also when I plan to finish writing the article) to the headquarters of the institute I am currently doing my Field Practical Training. The next two weeks might be a tedious one, but I’ll try to at least maintain the level of consistency I have been showing on the platform.

Moving on from my Sunday story, it is finally Monday, the start of a business week for some, and work week for others. For my group members and I, it is the start of a new chapter of our field training. You see, we have spent the first two weeks of the four weeks training at a branch of the research institute and it is almost impossible for any of the researchers we encountered in that two weeks not to mention the Headquarters: which my group will start going to this Monday.

They had shaped our mind to have certain expectations of the place which had lead us to satisfy our curiosity by always asking the other group members questions about their experience at said headquarters while we were stationed at the branch. Like a child, we’d ask questions with our eyes wide open and these questions are often met with truth of the reality, which is often disappointing and sad. Well, in their (the institute) defence, researchers are on strike for reasons we do not know, so this had led to the shutdown of many operations that we would have marvelled at, or so I believe.

But I have come to realise that I have a stubborn mind and subconsciously, I have still held on to fabrics of hope that my expectations will be met, at least to a good extent. This is my mind’s way of subverting the feeling that I had not wasted four weeks learning anything significant and surely there was new a new experience for me in this. Whether or not I will be disappointed depends on how I utilise of interpret what I may be exposed to.

This has lead me to believe that disappointment is relative to different people, and what I might find disappointing might not be disappointing to others. This was further cemented by a conversation I had with one of my classmates Sunday afternoon. Before I proceed, let me give a quick breakdown of the grading system in most (if not all) tertiary institutions in my country:

Grade A = Excellent. Score = 70–100/100

Grade B = Good. Score = 60–69/100

Grade C = Credit. Score = 50–59/100

Grade D = Pass. Score = 45–49/100

Grade F = Fail. Sore = 0–44/100

(This is the grade system for my institution)

So, as my course mate and I talked about academics, he explicitly stated that long as he can avoid grade F, he’d be proud of himself. Some others might set a certain standard and I have seen situations where people are disappointed that they had Grade B, and even more so that they had Grade C (feeling guilty). And here is someone who’s contented and proud if he could have Grade C all through.

In essence, what I am saying is that we live in a world where every thing is relative from individual to individual and from place to place. And with the size of the earth and the population of people on it, wouldn’t it be strange and boring if every thing were monochromatic?

Thank You For Reading 🖤🖤