The beginning of the end

Some 30 minutes ago I have finished the main body of my CEU thesis. When I look back, honestly, I can't believe it. I left my good job in Sofia, I left my girlfriend and my family to come to a country with a language I will never learn to write a text in a philosophical tradition I hardly knew at all. The first year was perhaps the most difficult in my academic life. Not because of the complexity of the ideas, which are usually far from simple, but because I had to face the true reality of my intellectual limits. I just could not believe that I am that stupid. Now, I am much more comfortable with myself. I know that some things I will never understand and this does not bother me as much as some 6 years ago. Yet, and this is the good part, I also know that if presented with sufficiently efficient stimulae I am capable, at least in principle, to develop my rationality in such a way that to become able to grasp what any human on the planet is able to grasp. Technicalities like time, energy, actual neuron configurations, love life, lazyness and the like I leave aside :). Thus, I have now much greater confidence in human rationality (and by far not just mine) than I had before. Also, I prefer to think that I have better understanding of it too. If I knew how those years would change my life I am not sure that I would have chosen the same way. Still, as I know how stubborn I am and especially for non-rational matters (I have reinvented the application of the euphemism "intuitive") I would have probably done all things in the same way again. I have the feeling that all mistakes that I made are actually inherent part of me and choosing to avoid them would have amounted to pretending to be someone actually I am not. Even the worst of them, such that concern and hurt the closest people. If I am a bad person and If I do bad things or simply stupid then be it but at least that is me and me alone. And I need to know my real me. This could not be a mistake. My text could be full of mistakes, for sure, but I liked the intellectual road that led to it. I might even not be able to defend but now (unlike 5 years ago) I really do not consider that so important. At the end of the day if the text is not good I myself would not like to get a degree that allegedly pronounces it as a good one. Fair enough. Walking is often so much better than arriving. Perhaps, there might be no arriving at all.