Maeda's SIMPLICITY

Each Spring Matters

Life is busy. It doesn't take a fancy set of college degrees to tell you that. The paradox of receiving an advanced education is that the more you know, the less you begin to care. You learn to care more about knowing -- which is a passive activity the last time I checked the dictionary.

By coming from blue-collar roots, I'm somewhat fortunate to have known what it's like to have less. Less time; more work. Things were difficult working 90-hour weeks at my father's little tofu factory in Seattle's Chinatown (the cultural equivalent of growing up in a family-run bakery somewhere in Brooklyn). As I remember those times, there was only the singleminded goal of my father that one of his kids would get accepted to college such that we wouldn't have to suffer physically like he and my mom.

There's a bestselling book Limbo that documents this paradox of the struggle to know and have more but ending up with less. I think it's befitting that the "Straddler class," as Lubrano calls it, should be able to use the tools of the intellectual world to frame their own situation. It is the reason why I write, I think. To better understand and cope with the complexities of how the world works not in the physical sense (as a scientist) but in the social sense (as a human).

Having turned 40 years recently, I see one more spring now that that has vanished from my counter. It happened so fast! Where did it go?

One of the privileges of being a professor is that while you sadly see wonderful flowers slowly fade (like the professors you once looked up to -- and still do), you also see brand new blossoms of life appear in the new students that arrive each year. You see their smiling faces and think only one thought: They are the future. You are the Present. Get them to the present sooner, and they can live the future longer!

This thought is surely translated from the academic workplace to any workplace. There are the bosses you adore that lose their luster over the years; and there are the new hires that carry the optimism you may have once blindly had. It is the balance of respect for the Past, respect for the Present, and respect for the Future that can keep us all sane.

So life is busy. Life is balance. And life is an opportunity to not be lost. Now I go back to the life that I love so dearly. Maybe you should do so as well.