“You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction.”
Bhagavad Gita: Chapter 2, Verse 47
I came across this quote in the epilogue of Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning is Now, but I apply it more to my personal studies of Mandarin and other pursuits. They feel so fruitless if I consider them with a lens of Western rationality. The most compelling praise I have seen to learn a new language has been to stave off dementia. But so can solving sudoku puzzles.
It’s only when I think I may carry this unfinished pursuit into my next life that I can stay sane about it, in my own sense of the word, and not lose hope. Because it is a pursuit of my soul, a deep desire to truly know and communicate in multiple languages.
When I think of what I would “do” if I were in college now learning this, I go a little mad, somewhere between feverish, erratic, and nonsensical plans, and despair. That ship sailed 25 years ago, and I wasn’t anywhere close to who I am now regarding that. I was locked into a path by a need to survive, and my subsequent efforts have shown that its is my path for the foreseeable future.
But no matter what, I can learn. Practice. Experience. It’s not about achieving fluency but about fulfilling a role as a seeker.
I am not too interested in the nomad pathlaid out in Howe’s book any more than those a war torn country are interested in the roles that they have had to adopt to survive. It isn’t really the same as who you are on a soul level.
Sunlight-Colored Roses 