Six months ago, a rough idea abruptly popped into his mind that he wanted to become a writer, trying to throw a stone into the tranquil lake and do something he had never done before.
“If I’m able to write a book by the time I’m forty,” he said, “I can die in peace.”
Standing in the front of the classroom for eight years or so, he grows a little tired of it.
“I can’t find as much passion as I did,” was what he said to me a number of times. “I don’t know why. I’ve just lost my enthusiasm. I shouldn’t have, but I did.”
“But working as a teacher used to be your dream job,” I reminded.
“Yeah, it was,” he responded firmly. “But now things seem to have changed. You know, I once loved teaching so much that I tried so hard to pursue my teaching career and make it happen. And it did, but now I’m thinking about escaping from it.”
“I don’t want to be involved in it anymore. It’s not that fun,” he added.
Some time earlier he told me that his teaching dream came originally from a unique experience during his middle school years.
“In primary school, I was just an average sort of student. Come and go invisibly most of the time,” he went on, “But ever since the first day when I entered the middle school, the route has gone in a totally different direction.”
“My confidence was growing fast like a newborn baby. And then my grades followed the same path. My name began to show up on some kinds of top lists. Teachers saw me. Classmates saw me. I was no long invisible. In fact, I frequently appeared over the rim of our teachers’ mouth. A so-called pet student.”
“How did it happen that way? What made it happen? Did you find a secret or something? Did you meet with a wizard who weaved his magic over you?” I was shooting one question after another at him to satisfy my curiosity.
“It happened simply because of two of my teachers. Two greatest ones in my lifetime. They changed every aspect of my study and my life. There seemed to be a watershed drawing a line between old and new. All of a sudden, I found who I really was and where I should go. I’m so lucky to have two of them in my schooling. I can’t imagine what it would have been if I hadn’t met them.”
Years later ...
