Chapter Thirteen: The Bigger World (~jinghan)
At the moment I have been thinking quite a lot about what I’ll be doing after I graduate. My plan is to eventually teach, but people are also encouraging me to do a Masters in maths. But now and again my hunger for more learning is half-hearted at best, which leads me to think wonder whether I’d be a good teacher at all if my enthusiasm for education is half-hearted, which leads to wavering into feeling dispair about where my life is going.
So this is roughly the state of my mind as I’m walking home (it was also on my mind that I had forgotten to transfer my house key to my new wallet, but that’s a different story…) I check the mailbox on my way up the drive way and there is a stack of letters from World Vision: tax receipts for donations from last year’s 40 hour famine. Not particularly significant, except that if I hadn’t been musing about world vision just then, I probably would have deleted the email asking me to register for the famine again from world vision without a second glance.
But as is the way of life, I do end up finding my way to the world vision website and end up watching the promo video for this year’s 40 hour famine. And because I’m a softy for the artistry of film media I watch two more and… ah a related video… yeah why not? one more.
I’m transported to a world so unlike mine, troubles that are so different, but there are people who don’t seem too different from me. I am reminded that there’s a bigger world than just the part that revolves around me – it’s somewhat overwhelming, but also comforting to be given this perspective. It’s like an answer to my lack of motivation: this bigger world is what motivates people to keep striving, learning, wanting more.
It’s so easy to get caught up in my own world that has no meaning other than what I make of it, and eventually you get lazy and let it drift into meaninglessness. Most of the time I think myself as a fairly industrious sort of person, I keep on top of things, I don’t like being “lazy” but when it comes to reaching out, reading about what’s going on in the world, curiosity about new things that might take a little effort at first to understand – I have to confess that I do have quite a hindering lazy in me. Left to my own devices I’d only ever approach things that are already familiar for me.
I will try and put a little bit more effort into reading outside of my comfort zone in the months to come. I started with this article, which help remind me of what I have to be grateful for and the power and importance of education: