If you prefer listening, here's the track. You can read along!
I remember complaining about my excessive (2 and half hours in total) train travel time in my first year of engineering. I used to hate lectures scheduled at seven in the morning - you have to leave your house at 6:15 if you want to reach close to on time and wake up at 5:30. About fifteen of us from college would go out multiple times a week and I didn't care much about how I should be utilising my time better. Neither did I have regrets about my high school results and life unlike other people.
One of the most passionate people about computer science that I know is a guy (now my best friend) whom I thought only cared about music and played the piano exceptionally well. You can imagine my shock when I realised how technically sound he was. I also thought that the latent heat of vaporization was the heat consumed and not heat released without a change in temperature.
I have been consistently wrong about things in my life. Train travel gives me breathing space, we recently protested to get back seven am lectures and if possible schedule them for the entire week, and my outings with friends are at an all-time low because my work is at an all-time high. And all these things that would be a downer are things I look forward to every single day. I used to think I did not understand physics but while explaining things to my sister who is full of good questions (which are good because, you know, you don't have an answer immediately) I realised that I do and I just didn't put much of an effort. Rediscovering physics with her is refreshing.
And while the mini-stories I have mentioned above are quite harmless, because of which it was quite easy to accept ignorance and admit wrongness, it isn't always that simple. Sometimes you go into denial, sometimes you feel betrayed and you'd rather believe the contrary like when you're wrong about a person for instance, and sometimes your ego comes in the way especially when the person correcting you is less qualified or younger. People who have strong beliefs and ideas find it even harder to see another way from theirs and accept that there could be flaws.
We tend to do things because we feel like it is the right thing to do. We love being right and hate being wrong. Kind of like how a lot of us think we are extraordinary. We hope to do things that only great people could, aim to solve issues that have been left unsolved, or set the trend that Priyanka Chopra beings to follow. We hope for our blogs to suddenly go viral and everyone to love our music. But we need to accept that we aren't probably as extraordinary as we wish to be. Just like we must accept that we're not always right and being wrong could probably be exciting as well.
If you like dark chocolate for it's bitter and black coffee for the taste nothing else can give you, and continue shrugging your shoulders to their milky variants, you have a win-win situation. Likewise, if you can appreciate the growth and learning from the bitter feeling of being wrong and open your mind to explore multiple possibilities, and continue being happy with being right - it makes you a more pleasant person to be around apart from content from the inside.
Anddd I hope I am not wrong about that^!
Kanksha :)
