When I was in elementary school, I remember there being this huge push to get people to realize that littering wasn't cool. We had special speakers come to our classrooms and talk about how throwing your trash out the window of your car wasn't good for the environment (a word you rarely heard used back then), and that the government was making effort to increase the number of trash cans around. After a little bit, though, it wasn't enough to have trash bins around, and we were educated on how to use recycling bins. Everyone felt big and important because we were doing our part to help save the planet (also a new concept back then).
I didn't really connect what was going on in school with the real world though, until one day I realized that something was wrong. I'd become accustomed to watching the trash on the side of the road while my parents drove, and seeing what interesting items I could identify out as we drive past. This was a pretty common sight back then:
It wasn't that people didn't see it, it had just been such an integral part of the scenery for so long that they forgot (or didn't care) that it was important. It was a fact of life: people threw trash out the window of their cars because that was more sanitary than keeping it within the vehicle, right?
One day, as we're driving along, I was thinking about something else and realized my eyes were telling me something wasn't right. I came back from whatever galaxy I was in, and realized that the roadside now looked like this:
How had this happened? There hadn't been a gradual lessening of trash, it was just gone one day. I later learned about the roadside crews made up of volunteers, prisoners, or people sentenced to community labor, but at the time, I was baffled. I knew that my family didn't do it, and of course the kids in my school would never litter, but it hadn't occurred to me that those lessons could actually make an impact on the world around us.
Not long ago, I read a book called The Tipping Point, which explained that every effort to change has a critical moment where things finally stop being so hard, and just happen (a hugely simplified summation). Nowadays, we have huge recycling centers, and its a lot less common to see trash on the roads except in areas that have bigger problems than trash. Recycling, caring for the environment, throwing trash away in bins instead of on the ground, all of these concepts have hit a tipping point, even if they're not yet universals.
This concept doesn't just apply externally, however. Whether it's an issue of leading a healthier lifestyle, changing to a more positive outlook, or having faith in yourself, internal changes have tipping points too. When I first started college in 2009, I had a goal to be a translator. I knew I wasn't good enough at French (my only semi-fluent foreign language at the time), but I busted my tail to do the best I could and learn as much as I could in the time I had. Later, when I added Russian, I knew it would require even more work because I didn't have the years of background there that I'd had in French.
I always set high goals for myself, though, and kept trying. I went to Russia and pushed myself, I pushed in class, I found Russian resources outside the classroom and pushed myself there, too. Then suddenly, when this semester started, something clicked. The first day of class, when the professor started explaining the syllabus, homework requirements, and the first reading- all in Russian- I realized that I understood 99% of what was going on. Yeah, I'm not perfect, but all that pushing on individual grammar points, exercises, news reports and conversational topics means that, when I step back and look at the general overview of things, I have a pretty decent grasp on the language. Add to that a completely chance encounter that led me to getting an internship with an actual translation company, and I think I've reached that point where things get easier. Not lazy, and never to a point where I won't do my best and try for more, but it's just a little less frenzied.
Sometimes we get so buried in things, it's hard to se what real progress we're making. It pays to step back and take a broader look, at least for a moment, and realize that it will all pay off someday. You might be closer than you think. Cheers!
I didn't really connect what was going on in school with the real world though, until one day I realized that something was wrong. I'd become accustomed to watching the trash on the side of the road while my parents drove, and seeing what interesting items I could identify out as we drive past. This was a pretty common sight back then:
It wasn't that people didn't see it, it had just been such an integral part of the scenery for so long that they forgot (or didn't care) that it was important. It was a fact of life: people threw trash out the window of their cars because that was more sanitary than keeping it within the vehicle, right?
One day, as we're driving along, I was thinking about something else and realized my eyes were telling me something wasn't right. I came back from whatever galaxy I was in, and realized that the roadside now looked like this:
How had this happened? There hadn't been a gradual lessening of trash, it was just gone one day. I later learned about the roadside crews made up of volunteers, prisoners, or people sentenced to community labor, but at the time, I was baffled. I knew that my family didn't do it, and of course the kids in my school would never litter, but it hadn't occurred to me that those lessons could actually make an impact on the world around us.
Not long ago, I read a book called The Tipping Point, which explained that every effort to change has a critical moment where things finally stop being so hard, and just happen (a hugely simplified summation). Nowadays, we have huge recycling centers, and its a lot less common to see trash on the roads except in areas that have bigger problems than trash. Recycling, caring for the environment, throwing trash away in bins instead of on the ground, all of these concepts have hit a tipping point, even if they're not yet universals.
This concept doesn't just apply externally, however. Whether it's an issue of leading a healthier lifestyle, changing to a more positive outlook, or having faith in yourself, internal changes have tipping points too. When I first started college in 2009, I had a goal to be a translator. I knew I wasn't good enough at French (my only semi-fluent foreign language at the time), but I busted my tail to do the best I could and learn as much as I could in the time I had. Later, when I added Russian, I knew it would require even more work because I didn't have the years of background there that I'd had in French.
I always set high goals for myself, though, and kept trying. I went to Russia and pushed myself, I pushed in class, I found Russian resources outside the classroom and pushed myself there, too. Then suddenly, when this semester started, something clicked. The first day of class, when the professor started explaining the syllabus, homework requirements, and the first reading- all in Russian- I realized that I understood 99% of what was going on. Yeah, I'm not perfect, but all that pushing on individual grammar points, exercises, news reports and conversational topics means that, when I step back and look at the general overview of things, I have a pretty decent grasp on the language. Add to that a completely chance encounter that led me to getting an internship with an actual translation company, and I think I've reached that point where things get easier. Not lazy, and never to a point where I won't do my best and try for more, but it's just a little less frenzied.
Sometimes we get so buried in things, it's hard to se what real progress we're making. It pays to step back and take a broader look, at least for a moment, and realize that it will all pay off someday. You might be closer than you think. Cheers!
No comments:
Post a Comment