Two Disciples (A Short Story)

I sat on the floor at my mentor's feet for many months. As his disciple, I had a lifetime's worth of lessons to learn. My mentor taught me to be aggressive in both my dreams and my determination to realize them. I was taught to not cower or create excuses.

Through great personal and internal struggle, I had begun to truly learn. The first revelation was that I had very strongly believed so many things that were wrong. The world did not work the way I had thought, and my mentor knew that and worked to open my eyes to that fact.

After many months of training and studying, my mentor took on a new disciple. I still remained his disciple as well, but I had reached a level where I could identify and teach lessons to others that had not yet had their eyes opened.

I was excited at the new disciple's first lesson. It was going to be such an amazing experience to witness these lessons external to them. I would be neither the teacher nor the student, but the witness. Certainly I was welcome to chime in, and I admittedly was excited to show off that I knew all these lessons.

When the new disciple began the first lesson, the mentor taught him to calm down, take his time, and think his plans through before acting on them. This left me perplexed. Why was my mentor teaching completely opposite lessons to this other disciple?

After some time listening and pondering, I understood that he was teaching the same lesson, but using different techniques. He wants both of us to find the middle path, where we take the time to measure all of our options, and also take the action to make things happen. However, because his two disciples were such different people, he had to lead us through different paths to reach the same endpoint.

I came to my mentor as one who spent much time thinking, but was too afraid to act. The other disciple came to the mentor confident and brazen, but lacking focus and planning. We had to learn very different instruction, but we ultimately learned the same lessons.

You're Always Moving Forward

Have you ever had a moment where you wished you could return to a previous time in your life? You could move back to where you used to live, take up your old activities, reconnect with your old friends. The problem is that you aren't going back in time; you're always moving forward.

Even if you did move back and get your old job, you're now older than you were. You have new experiences and new knowledge. You are not the same person you once were, so it is an delusion at best.

People cannot unlearn their knowledge or unlive their lives. People trying to return to their past are seeking a safety in their memories, but ultimately, they don't live in their memories; they live in the now.

Peace Comes Out Of Chaos

If you lived a stress-free life all the time, that would be awesome. However, you would not think of it as being peaceful. You wouldn't even think of it at all. It would simply be the way things are. Without any hardships to compare things to, living stress-free is simply living another day.

Peace comes out of chaos. Or more accurately, the idea of something being peaceful can only exist by knowing what chaos is like and not experiencing it.

This ends up being a sort of twisted facet of humanity: the harder a life somebody has, the more deeply they appreciate simply not being in the muck and mire.

Pressure

Pressure causes people to act. If nothing in our lives is compelling us to change, we generally won't. We would do whatever we wanted when we felt like it, and things would be fine. However, there are many pressures placed on people, coming from nature, society, and other individuals.

Colder weather pressures us to find shelter, stay inside longer, and wear thicker clothing. Societal pressure forces us to get jobs to pay for things like food and shelter. And individuals can pressure us to go to places or try activities that we otherwise wouldn't have done.

People often think of pressure as a bad thing. Pressure causes stress and anxiety. People are forced to do things they don't want by "peer pressure". But in reality, pressure is simply a force. It is neither good nor bad; it simply does what it does. People only ever notice when the pressure ends up hurting them.

Knowing Enough To Get In Trouble

I love language and languages. There is something immensely fun about being able to use different languages to express myself. It can also be used to  build a connection with somebody. Going to a Chinese restaurant and telling the server, "Nihao. Jintian zenme yang?" is a way of telling them that you know Chinese and are inviting a conversation. So if that happens to be the limit of your conversational ability, you will very quickly realize that you dug yourself into a sizable hole. 

This is called knowing enough to get you into trouble. It is a narrow threshold of knowledge in which you very clearly can do more than the average novice (anyone can learn to say "hello", but few people know how to say "how's the day going"), and yet your actual knowledge of/ability in a subject is functionally minimal. 

Too many errors of comedy or 90s sitcoms were based on a character pretending to be knowledgeable or skilled at something and them knowing just enough to get into trouble. 

Pick The Elephant

In an old episode of The Simpsons, young Bart wins a radio call-in contest. As the winner, he had the choice of receiving $10,000 or a full-grown African elephant. Clearly, he chose the elephant. Also clearly, it was an ordeal from start to finish. And yet, they didn't regret the experience. In fact, they loved Stampy and greatly enjoyed the experience. 

Today, I rented a 12-passenger van. 

My car was in the shop being repaired. I had stuff to do, so my friend and I went to the rental place to get a car. The woman behind the desk gave me two or three options of what cars were available, and I asked if there was anything else. She told me, "not unless you want a twelve-passenger van."  I looked at my friend and we both kind of smirked, and so I decided to get the van. 

This van was my elephant from the very beginning. The look on the woman's face was priceless. Listening to her actually trying to comprehend that one guy with no luggage and one friend was renting a giant van made me chuckle.

But you know what? That van drove like a boat on clear waters. It was large and cushy and smooth. The turning was different, and I couldn't really use my eyes to judge how far it was from objects, but I actually loved it. This was a new experience for me. It was done on a lark, and definitely gave me some stress and trepidation, but by 8 pm, my car was fixed, I returned the van to the agency without a problem, and I felt absolutely amazing for having had this experience. 

Sometimes, the better choice is the gag prize. Try picking the elephant, and see where that leads your life (or your characters).

Cold, Hard Facts

No one cares that the sky is blue; it just is. It's not even that they don't get upset or don't get happy; it's not even that they're ambivalent; there is no reaction at all. People don't think about the sky being blue; it's a cold, hard fact.

Admittedly, the sky being blue hardly affects us. It's not the same as finding out that you're low on milk (or whatever banal drink you enjoy). You know that you will need to pick some up at the store soon, but it doesn't provoke an emotional response. 

However, we don't treat all facts so emotionlessly. When you find out that your coworker has been speaking ill of you behind your back, it incites a vengeful ire that nothing short of blood can satisfy. 

Cold, hard facts should all be the same, yet humans treat them all differently. Go and explore how the simple learning of new facts can affect (or fail to affect) people.