Congrats! You passed your exams. Now let the real tests begin.

Today I sat with my friend waiting for her GCSE results. The results that would determine what subjects she could take at A-level, and in some small way, begin to shape what comes after that.

She did remarkably well. Congratulations Moss!

But as we sat there waiting, I found myself thinking about how much importance we place on these moments. You spend years in school, months preparing, hours sitting exams, and then one day you wait for a set of results that will decide what happens next.

At that age, the road seems clearly marked. You pass your GCSEs or O-level so you can choose your A-level subjects. You pass A-level so you can get into university. What you study at university begins to shape the work you might eventually do. One result leads to another choice, which leads to another road.

It is something to think that an examination you sit at sixteen can have a hand in deciding where your feet will eventually take you. But sitting there today, I also thought about how these are only the first of many tests we take in life. The early ones are likely the kindest.

They come with a syllabus. You know roughly what will be asked. You are given textbooks, teachers and past papers. There is a timetable telling you exactly when the test will begin and when it will end. If you prepare well enough, there is a reasonable chance you will know the answers.

And then you grow up. The tests continue, but the syllabus disappears. There are no past papers for most of what comes next.

There is no textbook for choosing the right career, knowing whom to trust, raising a family, making a marriage work, losing someone, starting something, ending something, taking a risk, managing money, admitting you were wrong or deciding when you have tried long enough.

Nobody tells you that the examination has started. Sometimes you don't even realise you were being tested until years later.

You make decisions with whatever information you have at the time. You choose one road and leave another behind. You get some things right. You get others completely wrong. Sometimes you prepare carefully and still fail. Sometimes you stumble into the right answer without quite knowing how you got there.

Unlike school, life does not always sends back a marked paper with results. There are moments when I wish it did. It would be useful to know that Question 7 was worth twenty marks and that I should have spent a little more time on it. It would be nice to know which mistakes cost me marks and which things I worried about were not even on the paper. Or is that in itself the examination? 

Whats more, we don't always know what passing looks like. Sometimes passing is succeeding, other times passing it is surviving. Sometimes passing it is having the courage to begin again. Sometimes it is staying, and other times it is knowing when to leave, when to fight, when to let go. 

There of course times when we fail. That is the areawhere life is very different from school. A failed examination at sixteen can feel like a door closing. Later in life, you discover that life has side roads. You can fail at something and still find another way. You can make the wrong decision and learn enough from it to make a better one later. You can end up somewhere you never planned to go and discover that it is not such a bad place to be.

Yeah, that is what I was thinking about as we waited for those results today. She was waiting to find out how she had done in one of the first important examinations of her life. There will be others. Some will come with question papers, tutors, texbooks, certificates. But most will not.

Life, it turns out, is one long open-book examination. The problem is that nobody tells you which book to open. So you read what you can. You learn from the people around you. You borrow answers occasionally. You make some up as you go along. You get a few spectacularly wrong.

Then more tests and exams are set, and maybe that is what life really is for all of us. We move from one test to another, most times not knowing the questions in advance and never quite sure how we have done.

I guess the best we can do is take each one as it comes, carry forward what the lessons from the ladt one, and hope that when the test comes, we know a little more about ourselves than we did before.

From where my feet are, that is as close as I will ever get to being prepared.