Friday, April 09, 2004
Excellence
I learned something about myself yesterday, and maybe something about human nature, too: putting your heart into something is what makes it meaningful to you.
As you already know, I have recently become a graduate student at Nanjing Arts Institute, and so far I’m enjoying it tremendously. Whenever I go there, I feel as though I’m soaking in a special kind of air, breathing in creativity along with oxygen, nitrogen and whatever else. It’s a place specially created for developing artistic talent, skill and inspiration—and it does just that.
I found that as I went there to study and absorb all those new experiences more, teaching at my Chinese high school began to seem older and less interesting. When I came back from my most recent trip, teaching English seemed almost unbearable, and I was filled with a desire to quit as soon as possible.
Then I realized that the high school itself hadn’t changed at all; my attitude towards it had. I let myself begin to think of it as an “old” thing and stopped wanting to try hard at it. In fact it was trying hard to be a good teacher all this time which had made it interesting in the first place. If I didn’t put any heart into this or any other part of my life, that part would certainly deteriorate into meaninglessness.
So now the challenge is to look at whatever I do with the knowledge that somehow just doing my best at whatever it is can really give it a life that it would never have had on its own. This website, for example, can only begin to transcend itself and become something more than just kilobytes on a hard drive when its author spends something of his heart on it, and uses some special love in the writing, a magic which belongs to his soul alone.
Perhaps this magic is a natural love of excellence itself. It can make any daily activity we undertake worthwhile and holy to us. Even if something seems to be meaningless at first, the act of doing our best at it can lift it into the realm of sacred work.
With that spirit, I ought to clean my apartment!
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