“Let me put it in this way, “I don’t have it, if you don’t have it”. Because, I have it, only to the extent that I can give it away; “that I can give it up and to, all others.”
But, in order that people may master these disciplines, (and this is the responsibility of the older generations) it must be understood that working on the disciplines, is fun! And this is the task of all good teachers.
All good, really gifted and great teachers are people who never have to resort in their classes to artificial methods of imposing discipline. They need no proctors, they need no punishments, they need no bribes, because the good teacher is the person who makes the work of learning the discipline so completely fascinating, that the student is embroiled. The reason being, that learning a discipline is not a matter of forcing yourself.
And here the English language leaves a little bit to be desired. We have a paucity of words for effort, for application, for concentration… that we can talk about when we’re talking with children, “You must apply yourself!”
Now, it’s perfectly true, nothing in the way of a skill will be achieved without practice. But, if practice is strained, still nothing will be achieved by it, except resentment. Many a child learns to hate the violin or the piano because it was drummed into him, “This is what you got to do! You got to apply yourself to it!”, …driving it home.
But, on the other hand, if there is a way of fascinating a child with the discipline of any musical instrument or what have you, then they can apply themselves day after day, after day, after day, and be fascinated with the discipline.
So, this is the skill of the teacher…through skillful means to get the student to love the art because, (remember this principle), if your student does not learn to love the discipline, he will never be any good at what you’re teaching him.
Now, you may know that certain kinds of scholars do work that most of us would think very tedious. Let’s suppose I take a field about which I know a few smatterings, which is the study of Chinese. Chinese scholarship is very difficult. You have an enormous amount of characters to study and you have to look up things in dictionaries and consult volumes of this, and volumes of that. But the true scholar is a person who just loves doing that! He’ll spend a whole afternoon going after one character through all sorts of things, sifting this reference and that reference, and he will be having more fun than someone at a bowling alley, doing just that!
And from the standpoint of an external observer, who has no particular interest in this, they’ll say, “Oh how hard he’s working!”
You know, in my private life, I must confess to you, I’ve had a terrible time with this because I love my work and people who had absolutely no comprehension or interest in what I’m doing would wonder, “how do I keep up the pace?” “how can I possibly do this, that and the other?” I love it!
But then there are other people who say, “You never do a lick of work in your life! You’re playing all the time! Just goofing off! It’s too easy for you because you love it!” But that’s the only way to get it done, and done well!
Because if you have something that is, say a good marriage; a good marriage is not the result of forcing yourself into that marriage. Are you seriously supposing that if you say to your husband or wife, “Darling do you really love me?” And the partner answers, “I’m trying my best to do so.”…? This is simply not a satisfactory marriage. We are not going to get beautiful work by mere effort, “against the grain.”
When you could tell, a cook instantly, by tasting one mouthful of a dish whether it was cooked “out of a sense of duty” or cooked “out of love”.
Now, a person who cooks out of true love will of course encounter days on which it is difficult. But somehow, the overall love of the art will manage to get him through those days when it’s difficult. And so with marriage, and so with the Mastery of any other art.
But, it is on the end of the older people. It is up to the teachers and the parents to present the disciplines of life as something that; not just that, “you ought to know”, but as something that it is beautiful to understand!”
– Alan Watts