taking

There is a particular day I have been dreading this month. 

I'm not one to believe I'm results-oriented, but I have been groomed all my life to care about fulfilling targets and objectives, no matter how arbitrary their basis, or how much I am aware of this but cannot shrug off the weight of this Asian, middle class upbringing. I'm more interested in the process. Or rather, I'm interested in being interested in the process. 

But let's deconstruct our understanding of "process" and "result." It is evident that both are components of a general linearity, with clear — at least with provisional semantic clarity — demarcations between beginning, middle and end. What, then, is the difference between the two, if the supposedly "mutually exclusive" preoccupations of "process" and "result" are derived from the same linearity of thought — a linearity that, if I may so dare to posit, necessarily functions in a framework of closed-mindedness? 

I have been groomed to receive results, and to believe that what we reap is what we have sown. The past few years have shed more than sufficient evidence to persuade me otherwise. I'm not bitter, because framing experience in terms of "effort" and "end", "process" and "result", is not a fruitful way to live. The way we rationalize the external world paradoxically counterpoints the experiences of our inner landscapes — for example, emotions have no other logic except the enigmatic one which they appear to operate by, and even then we constantly surprise ourselves. There are questions we will never answer — and hopefully will never find an answer to — about the separation of heart and mind, visceral experience and cerebral processes (my resignation to using this word in conjunction with "cerebral" is telling of how deeply ingrained the concept of a 'process' is within whatever is rational, even secure, to us.)

It is epistemologically interesting to me that the instant in which I know of my test scores (an anticlimactic point in this piece of writing) is also the instant in which I am infused with the knowledge of the future. I say "infused" because this knowledge cannot be taken away, yet this knowledge is so diluted as to be diminished, simply due to the fact that it is ultimately as significant as the other random events that the direction of life seems contingent on. I am foolishly invested in a dream that I know will not materialize, but tragically more so on humanity's shared illusion that to believe in a dream and act upon it will, with certainty, expedite its own materialization.