Sunday, March 11, 2012

Some important revleations and a few ruminations of late!

The last few weeks I have been busy teaching English and studying Chinese which both have become great passions of mine.  Of late, I have taken an extended break from over-exercising in order to allow my body the necessary time to heal from a strained abdominal muscle.  I also caught a pretty bad cold which exacerbating my period of down time the last two weeks. These two parallel trends have resulted in a complete change in my homeostasis as my personal life has suddenly reached a point of unmatched peace.  During this period of time I took a look at my life again for the first time in a few months.  I learned through some tough lessons that it is extremely important to live with a comfortable balance in life; neither giving the body too much, nor limiting it to too little of what it needs.  Living in extreme is both unhealthy to mind and the body.  I found out that not only was this true in a biological sense but also in a physical sense as well.  I was to discover after careful reflection on my life that I had chosen to be a teacher at a point in my life where I really did not know myself too well.
Looking back now, I realize that high school was not going to be a good fit for me personally as I am a person who desires competition and strives to have my success acknowledged by others.  Cooperation and teamwork are crucial aspects of teaching high school.  I am person who also wants to feel respected in the profession I am working in.  I believe that as a high school teacher, I would constantly have to try and earn the respect of students who I believe have the wrong outlook on what the teacher-student relationship is all about.  I feel that this is the opposite way that things should be and that I myself will never be able to change this reality; therefore, I must find a new type of career to meet my personal needs and desires. 
Since I have always been a very competitive person who enjoys communication and feels an intrinsic need and desire to respect people and be respected myself; I have decided that a career in business would best fit these requirements.  Obviously, a career in business is something that does not leave you feeling as intrinsically motivated as a career in teaching does; however, I believe that working for a company that is responsible for helping others through their products can also be extremely beneficial to people.  I also had the long standing belief that if I was to become a businessman I might become corrupted by greed or other self-indulgent desires outside of my own personal needs.  After some long mediation on the subject I finally realized that independent of your career a person can be good or bad depending on their own personal morals and not strictly based off of their line of work.  There are people in every career who are very good and very bad people; therefore, there is absolutely no reason why I cannot work in business and be one of the very good if I want to be.
With that in mind, I realized that there was nothing immoral about being a person in business.  I realized that I could be working for a positive and beneficial company whose products could make a positive difference in the lives of people every day.  I think that I found such a company in Ecolab.
I really like Ecolab’s global focus of promoting clean resources, energy efficiency, and healthy living.  I believe that being able to be a positive spokesperson for a company of this nature is the best answer for doing a beneficial career in business.  One important aspect for me I discovered was to find a company that would be creating products which benefitted all people around the world.  Ecolab’s acquisition of Nalco has positioned the company as a leader in the Asian market in the private sector. I also like Ecolab’s ability to push for efficient production of natural resources, such as water.
Another one of the important aspects of working for a company that has branches in Asia is that I can use my experiences in China to help me in my future career.  I really believe that I am making the most out of my experience; furthermore, I want to use my knowledge of China in which ever career I look towards in the future.  Since business between the United States and China will only continue to grow I feel that a career in business is an excellent way for me to be able to apply some of my understanding of China and the language best.        
Discovering that I needed to find a career that was right for me took a lot of reflection on my own life.  Looking back on my life in America, I realize now that I was constantly looking over my shoulder at the invisible competitor in my rearview mirror.  This caused me to push myself in every aspect of my life from sports, school, to even better my relationships.  I discovered that I often did things for reasons outside of myself and in ways that really were not ethical in order to satisfy my desire to succeed.  This took on a whole new level of obsession in college as I competed for a spot in division 1A football. 
In order to get to that desired level of competition I pushed my body to its limits as I lifted, ate, and trained everyday for the chance to play.  As I soon became frustrated for the first time in my life to succeed at something I turned to excess drinking, partying, and eating to assuage my bereavement at not being able to play.  Only after I had finished college and starting losing my excess weight from football did I realize the results of my unhealthy lifestyle the previous few years.  This came to as a shock to me as I had only ever been reinforced by society that I was supposed to be able to succeed at whatever I put my mind to.  Unfortunately, I had warning signs along the way from my family and friends giving me good advice.  The reality was that I did not really understand myself growing up and missed a lot of lessons that would be clear to me today.
This whole experience coupled with my loss of faith in the high school education system helped to propel me on the single greatest journey of my life.  Since I felt that I had consumed too much in the previous few years of college, and I decided that it was time for a change in my life, China seemed like a perfect place for me to go to push myself.  From talking with professors and acquaintances I knew that China was a place where I would not be surrounded by the abundance of things like I had become accustomed to as an American.  I also realized that I would be pushed in new and exciting ways which would help me solve some of the important issues in my own personal life.  On this journey I would travel though many different periods and face many different challenges.  The one constant belief during the whole journey has been my feeling that throughout it all I came to China for the right reasons and knew what I was getting myself into.
As I started my journey into my life in China I met challenges in the same mode as I always had in my life; face forward without fear of pain or failure.  Unfortunately, I was to find that again my dreams were going to be dashed as my body was not destined to endure a year’s worth of over training for the Chongqing marathon.  The beauty of this failure came in the fact that for the first time in my life I did not push myself to the point of completely tearing my hamstring to learn that I was not destined to champion the marathon this year.  Instead, I discovered that it was much better to not over-train my body and live within my physical limitations.  Successfully finding my boundaries before reaching a critical point of injury in my life was a real joy for me.
The second great change in my life came from analyzing the effects of my different lifestyle in China.  As I realized that Americans lived outside of their means both physically and mentally; I decided that I was going to try and live like the rest of the world and limit my resource capacity.  This was a somewhat interesting experiment that was eventually destined for failure.  At the time, I believed that I could maintain a healthy lifestyle and pursue intense exercise on a low-calorie / carbohydrate diet as long as I consumed enough sugar and drank plenty of fluids while exercising.   
The combined influences of training for a marathon, changing the content of my diet, and limiting my total caloric intake had drastic effects on my physical level of performance as time wore on.  That along with my incessant desire to not fail again forced me to sally forth through a summer of record heat in Chongqing, a place already known for being one of the warmest cities in China. 
Only after my failure was I able to realize that it was not best for my body to be limited in the resources it needed.  Therefore, I learned that living in either extreme excess or deprivation of what the body needed was truly unhealthy.  Only now do I realize that the body and mind are happiest when given exactly what they needs; no more, no less.  This seemingly easy lesson which everyone is told from a young age seems to have somehow avoided my realization in my state of being growing up.  Only now have I determined that in order to be successful I must meet the demands of my biological, mental, and spiritual self in moderation in order to be truly happy in life.
               All of this knowledge came through to me as I have spent the past few days talking with my Chinese friends over a variety of topics.  One such friend I have spent several times visiting helping prepare to take the equivalent of the GRE examination in the United States has helped me improve my Chinese greatly of late.  He asked me what I had been thinking about lately which helped me realize that I really had put a great deal of thought into my future without reflecting on the past few months in China.  Eric and many more of my Chinese friends are very responsible for helping me through some of these revelations as I have increasingly spent time working on my Chinese the past two months.
               The greatest change in my personal life has centered on my desire to really embrace speaking Chinese on a daily basis.  That coupled with nearly twenty hours of Chinese podcasts watched, a dozen Chinese movies, hundreds of note cards written, and many questions asked has helped me improve my Chinese at an accelerated pace the past two months.  My personal devotion to studying Chinese along with conversing in Chinese with my Chinese friends Eric, Jack, Maggie, and Emma have allowed me to reach a whole new level of verbal Chinese communication.  My greatest single obstacle remaining before feeling able to converse freely is my still a lack of clear comprehension of what people are saying back to me.  When I reach the point where I understand everything that is being said to me in return I know that I will be on my way to language proficiency.
               The other day in class I asked my students to share about any great ideas that they had discovered in their own lives.  Most of my students echoed similar responses relating to promoting world peace, protecting the environment, nature, etc.  The response of one student really stood out though as he remarked on wishing his high school experience could have been similar to that of an American student in high school.
After thinking a while and talking to a lot of my Chinese friends I discovered that many really do desire to be able to have the ability to think freely on their own.   Many are sick of living in fear that the government will take away everything in their life without having to answer for their actions.  Most of all, many would just like to be able to experience what it feels like to be able to have the freedom  to express themselves like Americans can.  Every single one of my students I have talked about their future have told me that they are so busy and need to work so hard that they never had time to consider their future.  Some discussed with me the frustration they had with not being able to choose the major they wanted to study, the school they went to, or being able to have the freedom that American students had to share ideas.
The thing that struck me most from this discussion was that with all of the freedom, liberty, and power of expression that American students have I should have been the happiest student on the planet in the United States.  Instead, I feel that I took a lot of things for granted growing up in America and wasted a lot of opportunities to be truly original.  I believe that I did not realize the freedoms that I had as a student, and I also feel like I did not even do a great job discovering a career I wanted to do while in college.  Likewise, I feel that most students in the United States take these same freedoms for granted and are as likely as I was to end up looking for a job in the wrong direction.  From looking at the situation from the standpoint of a Chinese student, I really feel a little depressed that many of my American peers will look back on their lives and wonder why they to choose the career that they did.  I would think that with the liberal education system in the United States more people would end up working in career that they loved.  Yet I think if everyone were honest with themselves many people would say that they are not in the right career and wish they could have found a different vocation.
The last great revelation which I found recently had to do with the idea of historical timing and benefiting from history in a way I would never have imagined without living in China.  The background from my revelation came from the fact that many people in China will tell you that China is a developing nation today.  At first, I felt that this comment was very odd indeed since I always thought of China as single greatest threat to the United States in an economic and military sense.   Therefore, when my students kept telling me this I felt that this might be a Communist propaganda campaign targeted to make people believe that they needed to feel threatened and use this as motivation to succeed. 
After being in one of China’s rural parts for over a year now I realize that this statement is absolutely true.  China has many problems with their infrastructure and a lot of them steam from the fact that they are trying to finish modernizing their country very fast.  The effects of China’s rapid modernization is that the today the country is dealing with a lot of pollution, poor workmanship, and demand issues related towards finding buyers for all the real-estate apartments that keep popping up almost overnight.  China is still the world’s premier producer of low priced goods, so they must challenge their mind set to try and modernize fitting a western model which has a one-hundred year plus head start in some areas of modernization.  I can see all of the problems of this modernization as everything from China’s transportation, electricity, and water development occurred in a matter of decades.  I thought about the history of the United States in comparison to China regarding our period of modernization and realized how lucky history was to the United States during our own industrialization period.
First off, the United States was extremely fortunate to not have to re-invent an older infrastructure and in a matter of decades such as China has done.  The United States was also favored by not having the population challenges that China has contend with.  Another important factor was the reality that like China the United States also had an abundance of cheap immigrant and slave labor during its industrial revolution to help develop it the manufacturing and agricultural sectors.  The greatest thing that benefited the United States was that besides the American Civil War (1860-1865) the United States developed during a relatively stable part of its history.  I think that many historians would also argue that the American Civil War helped to push manufacturing to reach production demands just like World War I and II did.  The obvious but unstated fact is that unlike China today people also flocked to the United States to take part in a democratic system which favored liberty to monarchy.  Therefore, many great European minds came across to help create innovative solutions and take advantage of American capitalism and opportunities unavailable in their former countries.
Overall, the last few weeks have been wonderful for me and I hope that I can continue to enjoy myself in China this much for the next few months before I visit Minnesota this summer!  Loving and missing of all throughout this period has been one of the steadfast parts of my experience.  Nonetheless, I am happy to report that I am happy and that things are going as well as they have for me since I arrived in China this time last year.
Best,
E.K.