Puzzling.

original

For today's linguistics final, my task was to recreate the phonemic structure of a proto-language using lists of cognates from three of its daughter languages and devise general rules for why the sounds changed the way they did. After two frustrating hours of stretching phonetic environments and conjuring up abstract justifications, I knew my approach was off. I wasn't seeing the big picture. Picking apart a language is like sorting through the pieces to a complex, interwoven puzzle; everything seems random at first, but once your rules start to click the entire data set falls magically into place. I knew my approach was wrong, as meticulously formulated as it was, but I couldn't convince myself to change. My logic was infallible because it was mine.

And that's really how I live my life. Arrogant though it may be, I consider myself to be absolutely, perfectly correct at all times unless explicitly proven otherwise (cited references, please). And today it was harder than I ever thought it should be to tell myself that my initial intuition for this problem was fundamentally flawed. But with half an hour to spare I forced myself out of my solipsistic paradigm. I made myself do things that made no sense. I floundered in exceptions and impossibilities and, really, I almost gave up--but then the Red Sea parted and BEHOLD, THE CONDESCENSION OF THE SOLUTION. It was weird. It was pedantic. But it was right. My Overzealous Grad Student (I'll miss him) flipped to the back of my exam after I turned it in (five minutes to spare) and congratulated me on my success.

I think an essential part of individuation is learning that you aren't always right--that your infinitely logical solution isn't always the best, that you have a really hard time pronouncing that consonant cluster, that you don't know what pi-allyl electron resonance means, that you don't know every single vocabulary word. You're not perfect. But that's okay.