On Being Tested

14 Ramadhan 1435

I thought today was going to be a relatively easy one. Yes, I had some marking to be done, but the set of papers I'm dealing with at the moment hadn't been overly troublesome for the last four days or so and I was going to be able to go back to bed after the dawn prayers and catch up on lost sleep with a bit of a lie-in. Such was the plan and how it went awry!

It turns out that for some reason my body wasn't all that keen to catch up on sleep and, although I went back to bed, whatever sleep I got was fitful and when I got up later to mark I didn't feel rested. Anyway, I dutifully applied myself to the first three scripts immediately upon rising and these went well enough. Then the problems began. Suddenly every script I picked up presented problems, basically due to less than decipherable handwriting and the torturous expression of ideas, nearly always combined. Normally when you get one such script there's some relief to follow. But in this case it was just one after another after another after another. My original calculation was that I would be finished by 2.00 pm latest. In the event I was still slogging along in the late afternoon. 

I suppose I passed the test by getting through my quota, but it somehow doesn't feel that way. I felt a lack of something; but I don't know what that something is.