My Fortune Faded

6 AM. I spring awake to Lil Jon screaming "Let's Go" as if I had been shocked with a defibrillator. It was time to get back on track for studying Genetics. My final is at 2 PM today (so 2.5 hours from now), and after going to bed at 3 AM my plan was to get as much studying as I could in from then on until the final.

No problem now. I was wide awake. Time to get working.

9 AM. I'm still lying in bed. Huh?! 9 AM??? Where did the time go?

"Oh, FUCK ME," I groan. Face held in my hands, I realized I only had 5 more hours to study instead of 8. My time had been cut almost in half. I was going to fail Genetics now, for sure. I spent a while cursing myself and wondering why couldn't I just get up and stay up like I was supposed to. Why did I have to cut my sleep time short? Why did I cut my study time in half? If I had just gotten up, I would have had a chance.

But then, it hit me. Did I really have that much of a chance? Would 3 more hours really have helped me that much more?

I already knew the answer. I had a snowball's chance in hell that anything at this point would have made any substantial difference.

The truth was, it wasn't my oversleeping 3 hours that brought about all this. It's been my approach and execution of what I did every day of my life this semester, up to this moment. At the beginning of the semester, I thought fall semester had taught me my lesson. I had everything planned out. Yet here I am now, remembering so many wasted days and nights, so many counterproductive hours doing stupid things for no reason whatsoever. So many times I turned down offers to even go out and party, and in the end wasted the night doing nothing. I could have executed studying for Genetics. I could have executed hanging out with friends. Instead, I haven't learned a thing.

Bruce Lee once said, "To spend time is to pass it in a specified manner. To waste time is to expend it thoughtlessly or carelessly. We all have time to spend or waste, and it is our decision what to do with it. But once passed, it is gone forever."

The sum total of your life and its quality amounts to the sum total of all the decisions you have ever made. Over the course of the semester, I decided to put things off. I got nothing. And it's not until now, at the end of the semester, that I realize how small of a total I've built up. I have repeatedly made the choice to compact all my stresses more and more into one apocalyptic time period, to try to make up for that total. While I made the conscious choice "No, I'll just do it later," the real decision I made unconsciously was "Yes, I want pain. I want suffering. I want to fail." I refused to listen to the real message. I have sealed my fate. I have chosen to fail, and I will fail.

A professor of mine also once said to me, "There is no magic to how people succeed. It's only that you do what you set out to do. Give a successful person an hour, and at the end of the hour, the successful person will have something to show you for what they did. An unsuccessful person will take that hour, and at the end have nothing to show for it. Which type of person are you?"

So, it's really no longer that I will fail. Regardless of whatever grade I end up with, the final result is, I have already failed. I failed to learn discipline. I failed to learn daily execution. I failed to build the skills and mindset that sticking with my classes would have taught me. I even failed to party my ass off as hard as I could, whenever I could. I failed to make this semester worthwhile. Over and over, and over again, I have failed where I could have succeeded.

So divine, hell of an elevator
All the while, my fortune faded.
Never mind the consequences of the crime this time,
My fortune's faded.

So, the past is done with. But what about the future? I wish I could say that I will no longer fail. Ease the pain and reassure myself that next semester will be better. After all, I've learned my lesson, right? But right now, what control do I really have over that? Worrying myself and creating anxiety over a future I can't control is suffering. And I've done enough of that.

I like an Albert Einstein quote that reads, "I never worry about the future. It always comes soon enough."

So sure, somewhere in the near future, I plan to straighten myself out, but the truth is that the future comes when it comes. It doesn't matter at all how you plan to do something in the future. Doesn't that sound ridiculous?

But it's true. The fact is, regardless of how much I plan to do something, I haven't done it yet, so I'm still the same person. Only the present matters. That's what Einstein realized, and that's what I have failed to make a part of my life.

The past is dead. The future is unborn. Only the living moment matters.

So, as I try my best to quiet the pit of snakes in my stomach (the butterflies are long gone), all I can do for now is forget the exam is 2 hours away, and my life at present is all about spending each second slowing the bleeding from a wound I've kept open all semester.

I am who I choose to be.