Failing with Passion??

I might finally fail a class - for the first time in my entire life. But that's not worrying me. The fact that it's at a post-graduate level, when the coursework I have chosen is finally not because someone or something is forcing me to take it, but because I chose to take it - because of the passion I had discovered I have for those subjects after narrowing it down to what what years of education had taught me to like and dislike. The thing that worries me, is that I cannot understand why this would happen.

Sure, there were factors that had contributed to this outcome, and I could blame all of them, or just my will alone. But where was the passion when I had needed it? Why did it not lift me above the turbulence that my life was passing through and make the journey smoother, more effective, more productive? The experience is making me question the effects of organised education on passion. Education, the way I see it is a very disciplined approach towards any given objective. And discipline is about control, as opposed to creativity which is about unleashing a potential. So, even though education is the reason I have reached a level of understanding and compassion towards a given subject, it may well have come to the point where the very strength it had been providing to this organism is making it brittle when exposed to the realms of the real world.

Maybe, for every subject there is a certain point when you need to balance the strength with the ductility. For instance, as far as certain fields of physics are concerned a person may need (the equivalent to) multiple doctoral degrees to come to a level of understanding with which they are satisfied. But with certain art degrees, a mere diploma would be enough to allow the person to reach the peaks of their creative powers.

To me then it seems a simple questions of weighing your options: to worry about grades, or to really understand something new. But of course, both can be achieved with the abundance of passion and effort. Most of us, however, don't have the luxury though...I like to take my time in really absorbing a concept, asking too many questions, getting irritated with too many assumptions. For me, the options are to accept and move on, or stick with what I really understand regardless of whether it gets me far enough. I, however, do have the freedom of choosing the latter. I guess I just took that liberty...