The Examinations I Wrote Standing Up

The examination hall

There are moments from our past that the body remembers more clearly than the mind.

For me, one of them is my second-semester PGDBA examinations. The other students were seated at their desks. I was standing at the professor's dais at the front of the room, trying to keep my hand steady while tears ran down my face.

I was not nervous about the paper. I was in pain. Sitting had become almost impossible.

I kept writing because I believed I had only two choices: endure the pain or lose the semester. My professor had been kind enough to let me stand, so I did. This was not one difficult paper. I returned to that position through multiple examinations, standing at the dais and writing through the pain until the semester examinations were over.

When the last examination was over, I felt relieved. I had made it through.

For a long time, that was how I remembered those days. It was another difficult situation I had managed to overcome. With age, I have come to see something else in it.

Getting through a moment is not the same as escaping its cost.

Before the examination

Sport had been woven into my school years. Badminton and cricket were part of daily life, with an occasional game of tennis added when the opportunity arose. I did not think of exercise as discipline then. It was simply something I enjoyed.

During graduation, sport gradually gave way to the gym. I was young and more interested in how hard I could push than in understanding what my body needed. Rest felt like a concession. Restraint felt like a lack of ambition.

So I kept adding weight and effort. Eventually, I went further than my body could safely follow and ruptured discs in my lower back.

The injury changed ordinary things. Sitting through a lecture became an ordeal. A journey could leave me struggling long after I arrived. Even concentration was harder because pain has a way of taking up space in the mind. It does not remain politely in the part of the body where it began.

That was the condition in which I entered the examination hall, not once, but for every paper I still had to complete that semester.

The part that endurance could not solve

Surgery followed soon afterwards. By God's grace, it went well. But surgery was not a clean return to the person I had been before the injury. It was the beginning of learning how to live with what had happened.

Years of desk work and frequent travel did not make that easier. There were long periods when the pain stayed in the background, quiet enough to ignore but never entirely absent. Then a long day, an awkward journey or too many hours in a chair would bring it forward again.

I continued to work, travel and take on responsibility. From the outside, that can look like recovery. In many ways, it was. But the body keeps its own record of the bargains we make with it.

We often praise the person who pushes through. In workplaces, it can even become part of someone's identity. They are dependable. They do not complain. They always find a way.

Those qualities can be admirable. They can also hide a question we would rather not ask: what is this costing the person who keeps finding a way?

Finishing those examinations showed that I could endure the pain for as long as I had to. It did not mean the pain was harmless. In the same way, completing a demanding period does not prove that we can live like that indefinitely. The body may allow us to borrow from it for a while. It does not promise to forget the debt.

What I wish I had understood sooner

A doctor friend who helped arrange my surgery later shared an image that stayed with me. Life, he said, is like juggling several balls: family, friends, health, work and values. Most of them are made of glass. If we drop them, they may break and we may spend a long time trying to repair them. Work is the rubber ball. It is the one most likely to bounce back.

I did not always live as though I understood that distinction.

Many of us do not. We postpone the walk, the appointment, the sleep or the recovery because the work in front of us feels urgent and health feels patient. It does not send meeting invitations. It rarely demands an immediate reply. Its warnings can be quiet enough to negotiate with, until they are not.

Taking care of ourselves is not a dramatic decision made once. It is usually a collection of small choices that do not look important on the day we make them. How long we sit. Whether we rest. Whether we listen when pain first appears. Whether we treat recovery as part of the work or as an inconvenience keeping us from it.

I still value perseverance. I know there are periods when we have little choice but to keep going. Those examinations were one of mine.

But I no longer confuse the ability to endure something with permission to keep doing it to myself.

I completed every paper that semester. My back has remembered the price far longer than I remembered the questions.