CBEST

I found out I passed the California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST) today. I wasn't really worried, but with a test like the CBEST, you have everything to lose. By this I mean that with a test as easy as the CBEST, you lose more by failing than you gain by passing.

Well, that's not actually true, but I would certainly have been embarrassed if I had to tell my engineering friend and doctor brother that I failed.

I was excited and slightly relieved, but, much like last week, the pleasure and celebrations were short lived. By the time I closed the congratulatory email, the feeling was gone.

The experience today and my experience from last week got me thinking about why my successes feel so much more flat than my failures. I remembered Edmund Burke had something to say about the terrifying pain of sublimity:

I say the strongest emotion [sublimity], because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. Without all doubt, the torments which we may be made to suffer, are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasures which the most learned voluptuary could suggest, or than the liveliest imagination, and the most sound and exquisitely sensible body could enjoy. (549-50)

Perhaps humans are hard-wired, in a biological sense, to gravitate and fester on their failures. Perhaps stewing over our failures is an evolutionary trait designed to keep the race constantly learning from our mistakes. A person's successes are more easily thrown asunder because it is less important to concentrate on something done well. From an evolutionary standpoint, it seems unwise to waste energy celebrating when there are so many other survival skills to develop.

And one of the worst aspects of this seeming truth is that failures and successes do not relate to each other in a quantifiable manner. The current sting of one failure in my life has obliterated the happiness of, not one, but several successes. Failures seem to be sink holes, voids satiated not by successes but by time.

Maybe I'm just incapable of being happy, as my high school girlfriend used to say. I hate to think she was right—she was such a jerk. Maybe I'll be happy tomorrow just to prove her wrong; I'm sure that's emotionally healthy.


Works Cited:
Burke, Edmund. "Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent Leitch, et al. New York: Norton, 2001. 536-51.