“Life is a test and this world a place of trial. Always the problems — or it may be the same problem — will be presented to every generation in different forms.” ~ Winston Churchill
Despite what we may hope for during our school years, test-taking doesn’t end once we finish our formal education, as if tests only happen in classrooms. For those of us with test anxiety — which is really just fear of failure in disguise — the idea of an end to tests brings a certain sense of relief. Then you realize (some of us more slowly than others) that life itself is one big classroom, and testing — or being tested — is an unavoidable part of existence. Quelle horreur! (That’s about all I remember from six years of French.)
When I was in college the first time (back in the 1900s), I had to take a stress management class to deal with some fairly impressive physical manifestations of anxiety. We covered breathing techniques and meditation, and even got hooked up to a biofeedback machine for a session. Our textbook was a self-help book called You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay. Bits and pieces of that book stuck with me over the years, but my original copy disappeared somewhere along the way. Since it kept resurfacing in my thoughts, I tracked down a used copy and started reading it again.
You know those moments when you’re reading something and a sentence practically jumps off the page and grabs you? This quote did that:
“Did you understand that tests and grades were only to see how much knowledge you had at a given time, or were you a child who allowed tests and grades to measure self-worth?”
I read it three times. Then I underlined it. Then I sent it to my daughter. At 55 years old — and despite reading this book at least once 30 years ago — it felt like a revelation.
Tests — including the ones we go through as adults with relationships, finances, jobs, health, children or aging parents — aren’t there to destroy us. They’re measuring what we know at a given moment. They show us where the gaps are. Where we need more experience. More knowledge. More skills.
They are not declarations of our value or worth.
The only way to know what we still need to learn is to discover what we don’t know yet. And that’s the good part of all this: no matter how old you are, no matter where you are in life, as long as your brain is still mostly functional, you can always learn something new.
P.S. Thank you again to friends and loved ones for your care, prayers and concern for my mom. She has been sent home (to her great relief) under hospice care following the discovery of additional health issues. Now we wait. And waiting is a test in and of itself, isn’t it?
