Finals are pointless

 Ah, finals week.

It’s amazing how much that one simple phrase communicates. Just three words, and probably half of you fainted dead away with the sheer force of mental exhaustion conveyed.

I’ll wait while someone gets the smelling salts.

…

… And now that we’ve all overcome our trauma, I have a story for you.

It was Tuesday of finals week, and I strutted across campus in recital attire, confident in the knowledge that my piano jury was going to absolutely ROCK. (For you muggles out there, a jury is like a final exam, but for musicians.)

For this occasion, I had chosen the best and most impressive repertoire in my piano arsenal. Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in c# minor–you know, the one with the big, bell-like chords and really fast middle section–and Chopin’s Prelude in Db major (or “Raindrops” Prelude). With such a set, I was prepared not only to rock my jury, but to own it. Perhaps even… to kill it.

Arriving a good 30 minutes before my scheduled jury time, I locked myself in a practice room (my favorite one with the temperamental Steinway) and ran through my set. It was glorious and thrilling and everything I had worked so hard for it to be. Yes, this jury would be dead before it even had the chance to expound on my expert technique.

10:00 arrived. I walked into Dr. Sidebottom’s office, where he and one of the other piano professors waited to judge my performance (no, his name isn’t actually Dr Sidebottom; that’s just a ridiculous pseudonym I contrived out of respect for his privacy, you naive muggle, you). When I took my seat, something about the bench felt a little off, so I readjusted it until it was the proper distance from the piano. I still sensed a weird kind of awkwardness, like when you feel a phantom hair brushing your arm, but no matter how hard you try to find it, it won’t show itself, leaving you to wonder if chemistry class has finally sapped the last of your sanity. I dismissed this feeling as nerves or some such nonsense.

Oh, how wrong I was.

About three measures into the Rachmaninoff, the problem revealed itself to me. The piano bench was set roughly five feet higher than is generally acceptable, thanks to the lunatic who played before me. And you wouldn’t think something like that would matter as much as it did, but it was just enough to throw off the entire balance. It’s not often I get the opportunity to blunder through a performance with that level of mediocrity, but fate had presented me with the chance of a lifetime, and I took full advantage of it, kicking myself repeatedly the whole way down.

“Good job,” said my professor at the end of the piece. I pictured him wincing behind my back.

“@$#&!,” I replied (silently).

After that ordeal, I made sure to adjust the bench to the right height before playing the Chopin artfully. My professors lauded my musicianship, but I left feeling disillusioned with the knowledge that Rachmaninoff would surely have scoffed at my painful rendering of his masterpiece.

Walking back to my dorm, it occurred to me that I was nowhere near as dejected as I would have been had such misfortune befallen me a year or even six months before. Even though my jury hadn’t been nearly as successful as I’d expected, there was no familiar crushing weight of humiliation to slow my steps. I was disappointed, for sure, but I also had this strange feeling of rightness as I left the whole experience behind me. And it struck me how we humans like to do this to ourselves–the whole “everything is leading up to one ultimate peak and if I screw anything up at that point my life is over and I might as well just go live in a box next to the interstate” thing. What also struck me was how stupid and unhealthy and fruitless that notion is.

I mean, we go our whole lives being pushed toward deadline after deadline. First it’s preschool, then it’s elementary school graduation, then it’s the three years of hell that is middle school, then high school graduation, then quick, get yourself a degree so you can start a career before the age of 25 and make bucketloads of money, so that then you can finally have peace and security for your future retirement from that much-desired career. And that’s if everything goes according to plan. If you get that 4.0 GPA and ace all your juries and make friends with all the right people. Forget all those dreams you had before, about having a family and a dog and going to Europe to see the castles and dungeons complete with medieval torture chambers. Forget about finding enjoyment in the creation of art, and experience for experience’s sake. Forget about living.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to have goals. Goals give us motivation and help us live with more purpose. But letting your joy be dependent on the realization of those goals will always be a mistake. Because we can’t do everything we set out to do. We’re all just a bunch of flawed people trying to get everything right, failing epically more times than not. And sometimes, we have to let ourselves be okay with that, and move on.

“Finals” doesn’t mean “your last chance ever to prove your worth as a human being.” Don’t give that word more credit than it deserves. They’re called finals because they’re the final tests of the semester. That’s all. No fireworks. No nails in the coffin. Just a convenient way to signal the end of something. Like the two words I’m about to use right now in an attempt to make the conclusion of this blog post pithy rather than cheesy.

THE END