The past is your textbook, the present, your test, the future, your result. There are no lecturers, professors, teachers, just you in a lonely race. Everyone else you know face the same time, and helping each other can be beneficial, if the present situations are similar.

As time go by, the textbook get thicker, the test gets harder, the results get more uncertain.

More often than not, you realize the textbook is so thick that you can't study everything, but rather try to understand parts of it well, parts of it you hope can help in your test that will bring about a better result.

The test changes all the time, today it might be on general knowledge, tomorrow on people relations, the next time on presentation of speech. And yet the textbook does not change. It's the same old one, just every getting thicker. Sometimes it helps you in the test, sometimes it appears to be totally worthless to the current test.

As for the results, no one knows for sure what you'll get until you actually get it. And yet it always seem so ever important to get a good result, for life isn't a game, but a constant test of your mortal abilities to best yourself. Sometimes, the textbook cover everything tested, the test had questions you thought you knew all the answers too, yet the results still appear way less than desired. And we get baffled over how that happened.

Yet in the end we still turn to that ever-thickening textbook, looking for answers that we don't even know if it really exists, to prepare for a test that we don't even know which topic would come up, just so we can attempt to have a better result that we don't even know what it is for.

How ironic is life?