It is funny what our brain chooses to remember. And when it does too. That is exactly the case with me and my school Anthem.
From the first day I got into junior secondary school, my school anthem sounded like a foreign language to me. The fact that other students always sang it in a hurry, like they were competing against a timer, or they had somewhere else they’d rather be, that didn’t help my cause.
The fact that I was constantly coming late to the morning assembly didn’t help either.
By the time I finished junior high school, I will hesitantly say I knew just about fifty-five percent of the lyrics to our school anthem.
Getting to the senior secondary school, it was a repeat of the same cycle. This time, slightly worse though.
The tune to the anthem had what I at the time, and still until today, considered to be an unnecessary ascension and descent. You could hear that lots of the students were murmuring and making up words to keep up.
This time around, I attended the morning assembly more often than I did in junior high school. But by the time I finished, I am sure I knew less than fifty-five percent of the school anthem wordings.
For most of the years I was at either school, it made no difference to me that I didn’t know the lyrics. I can remember different teachers threatening to punish students who couldn’t recite the anthem, but I couldn’t be bothered.
Thankfully, I can’t remember any of the teachers going through with their threat.
Years after I finished high school, I can remember bumbling through the words of the anthem in my heart and realizing that I actually knew every word of both anthems.
“When did this happen?” I asked myself.
All the years I was there, my brain chose to ignore it, but once I got out, it fixed it up.
Why? How? For what purpose exactly?
It dawned on me that somewhere in the recess of my mind, my brain had been dedicating some processing power to figuring this out.
Maybe I was indeed bothered about this, but had convinced myself otherwise. Or maybe my brain did this to challenge itself, and prove there was nothing beyond it.
Either way, I am proud that I figured it out because my school anthem is actually filled with philosophical gems. Especially that of the junior school.
I should mention that I also know the school anthem of another school I didn’t and couldn’t have attended. An all-girls school. Turns out by knowing a ridiculously large amount of students who attended that school at different times in my life, my brain had somehow assimilated the words to their anthem.
I don’t know if it is something I should be proud of, but I sure am proud of myself.
The brain is indeed stronger than we ever imagined. Don’t stress over things. Even the subconscious part of you is working to fix things that matter (and do not matter) to you.
Wilson Joshua is a Video Editor, Content Creator, and Creative Writer.
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