Life's Learning Curve

Khaleej Times (LIFE) / 11 June 2013

As a student of a convent school, I have endured many hours of what was then intolerable torture in academics – Moral Science classes. I used to harbour great dislike for the period that choked me with lessons on abstracts that made little sense to me at that young age.

Love, prayer, truth, honesty, charity, gratitude.…the lessons on values took me around the same bends year after year and I coursed through them with a yawny face and drooping eyes, barely making sense of what the teacher spoke. 

We also had a test to take every month, which made the ordeal worse and wearisome. The geography class with its latitudes and longitudes were the only equals in boredom to the weekly platitudes of the Moral Science class. The only thing that made me cram it with much distaste was the high scores the teacher granted us despite our pathetic understanding and expression of ethical matters.

The numbers gave my report card some mock dignity and put me in an imaginary, feel-good spot. I knew that my performance in the subjects that really mattered left much to be desired, yet I lived in the deluded notion of having excelled in some subject, albeit boring and worthless in my juvenile view.  As we moved up the grades, Moral Science wilted and faded out of our curriculum.

Subjects that promised to build careers and propel professional growth gained primacy. We earned proficiency in natural and social sciences, specialised in our streams and trotted up the social ladder bolstered by our degrees. We conducted our lives with élan, indulging in jugglery and trapeze acts to win applause, and stamp multiple stars in the report card of our lives. Yet, somewhere, there was a strange void threatening to tip the scales of our seemingly smooth existence.

Apparently adept, yet feeling deeply inadequate, there was some essential cog missing in the wheel. The report card with all its phenomenal scores wasn’t complete, and I finally figured out why — Moral Science, as a subject, had long since quit the course of 
our lives.  

The accumulation of scholastic knowledge that we prided ourselves on, looked wasted in the absence of ethical understanding. The profusion of wealth that we flaunted around seemed shallow without moral bearings. The sterling quality of our report card tarnished when we misplaced our fundamental values. We knew things were amiss and we panicked, and one day set out on a nomadic journey to find the missing element that would bring us eternal peace and joy.

We hired self-help books and philosophical guides to set the moral compass of our lives right. We attended inspirational lectures and listened to wise men in the hope of putting our mental mechanism in order. We swallowed the words of wisdom that they prescribed like antibiotic capsules. We sought instant relief, making entreaties for divine intervention. We returned to classrooms, where they gave us spiritual tonics.

In effect, we began to take Moral Science lessons all over again, this time consciously, in pursuit of that elusive elixir that will deliver us from the secret sufferings of our body, heart and soul.

Every time I am in a spiritual classroom now, I wonder if whatever I am presently hearing aren’t mature versions of the basic principles that the teacher had tried to drill into us several years ago during the Moral Science period. What was then a mere subject that helped me spruce up my academic record, is now the guiding principles of my adult life.

The ethical seeds that were carelessly thrown in during my childhood, later sprouted and then spread to become a canopy of life lessons. For a student still grappling with the vagueness of virtues and vices, rights and wrongs, it traces a learning curve. It supplemented my grades then. It sustains my life now.  Between then and now, what has changed is the attitude.