TWO MISTAKES, TWO REMEDIES
Kantar wanted to go to university very much. He also wanted to go away from his family. So, he worked more ambitiously than most of his friends did.
He calculated that he was going to get very high points in the university exam. So, he thought he must select a department which required very high points. None of his teachers at school told him that this was not a good way of making selections, because everyone believed that the higher points a department at university required, the better it was. So, he thought he was doing the right thing. He looked up the lists and chose the highest department that he could go to: economics.
Kantar managed to go to economics department. Some of his friends were very successful too. But he was twice as happy as them for he was finally going away from his family whom he hated. Therefore, it was no surprise that while his friends were crying for leaving their families, he was smiling.
At university he wasn’t as happy as he expected. The most important reason for his unhappiness was the fact that he had chosen the wrong department. He didn’t recognize this for two years. One evening in his second year he was studying economics. He was reading the economics book. He was underlining important parts and taking notes. That was quite usual. There was one thing, however, which was unusual. He recognized that the parts that he had been underlining were not really important. He had underlined them not because they told important things about economics. He had underlined them simply because they were beautiful sentences. In other words, he wasn’t interested in what was written in the book but he was interested in how it was written. He understood that he had made a mistake by choosing economics department. “I should have chosen what I was interested in”, he thought to himself. Fortunately, it wasn’t too late. He could enter the university exam for the second time and go to the right department for himself. But what was the right department? He didn’t have to think for long; it was quite obvious.
Next year he was where he should be. Thus he corrected one big mistake.
Now there was another mistake to be corrected: his feelings about his family. He felt extremely lonely in his new university. He often thought about his family. He remembered his childhood and how happy he had been with his family. He remembered how mercifully his father had behaved to him and how his dear mother had loved him. He understood that he had made a big mistake by hating his family. Now he was shedding the tears that he should have shed long ago when first departing from his family. In this way, he hoped, he would be able to make up for his other big mistake.