Dancing in September

September is such a romantic month. I'm sure that impression is influenced by the 4 year anniversary relationship between me and my significant other, but I've always felt that the end of summer was the most nostalgic and romantic time of the year. Bustling people and darker evenings seem to recharge my spirit (so long as those bustling people keep their distance!). Even breathing the air is more exciting, electric, and at the end of the day I feel a satisfying exhaustion (then restlessness the following morning).

My boyfriend of almost 4 years-wow-is realizing his harrowing task in graduate school as his assignments become more frequent and time-consuming. The texts are as dull as watching paint dry or shadows moving under the sun. I suppose someone has to write the obvious stuff, like "Data is stored in libraries," but must that fact be prolonged among hundreds of pages? I feel for him.

Tutoring a foreign student makes me realize how much has to be understood about another person. So much sadness stems from misunderstanding. It's sounds so simple to state that old cliche, "Walk a mile in someone else's shoes," but who has really ever worked that hard just to understand someone's hardship? Or even someone's success? Don't we tend to sum up failures and successes into a "bad" or "good" category instead of evaluating the people individually? I'd assume that someone who has worked their whole life to earn a good living is hardworking so they would fall into the "good" side, but what if their whole life they were working hard to avoid scrutiny from someone close to them, fearing that their work was never good enough? We can sympathize if that were true, and may even further imprint them into the "good" side, but what of the person's "failure" to fearfully weigh someone else's opinion even when no actual scrutiny took place? Now they just sound pitiful. This hardworking person may be a success at earning money, but upon further evaluation their reward seems irrelevant to a factor of accomplishment and more a factor of whatever this one other person close to them happens to think. I hope my tutoree (?) doesn't feel this way.

In that example there is misunderstanding on both sides- the hardworking person and the one judging. The person (or Bob) has misunderstood, or misinterpreted, a healthy motivation for success. The one judging Bob has interpreted their earnings as a success, not as a "side effect." I suppose we'd like to think that our money is not a side effect but it is a good reflection of ourselves and our hard work (when there is much of it), and when we're poor it may usually be a fault of the "economy" or some hardship such as illness. So, when is earning a lot of money a "success?" It would depend on each individual case, I suppose, just like being considered poor is not always synonymous with "useless" or "lazy," but is sometimes considered to be a "side effect" of some hardship. So when there is an evaluation of money v.s. success, it seems that those who interpret the most money being the most successful forget the arbitrarily assigned status to which money brings...

So the lesson is: Being happy and doing your best is the most successful a person can be. Also, walk a mile or two.