On my last day of summer class, the students said goodbye to their pirate professor. That night, while lying on my couch, I ruminated on the six-year-long nomadic phase. Before I had started teaching, I would find every opportunity to escape into nature, and find solace as well as enchantment in its delicate, minute details and its grand offerings alike. That is how the passion for traveling off the beaten path had been born to start with. However, after I had started teaching, besides the precious reconnection with the part of my inner self that would forever remain a student, the scope of human interactions altogether had multiplied manifold. And those interactions had provided access to previously unvisited corners of another grand garden— the garden that rises in sentient human hearts. I had witnessed a rich spectrum of human emotions and sentiments, and I had witnessed the kindling of passion and curiosity. I had received a clearer glimpse of the good that human beings have the capacity for, despite limitations dictated by finiteness, selfishness, or even malice. In the course of my teaching, in the course of new friendships in all the different places, and even on my interview trips, I had had human interactions that had left an impression both dulcet and hopeful. And in the course of all that, I myself, severely limited in my own capacity for goodness, had perhaps become a marginally better human being.
Sneak-peek
On my last day of summer class, the students said goodbye to their pirate professor. That night, while lying on my couch, I ruminated on the six-year-long nomadic phase. Before I had started teaching, I would find every opportunity to escape into nature, and find solace as well as enchantment in its delicate, minute details and its grand offerings alike. That is how the passion for traveling off the beaten path had been born to start with. However, after I had started teaching, besides the precious reconnection with the part of my inner self that would forever remain a student, the scope of human interactions altogether had multiplied manifold. And those interactions had provided access to previously unvisited corners of another grand garden— the garden that rises in sentient human hearts. I had witnessed a rich spectrum of human emotions and sentiments, and I had witnessed the kindling of passion and curiosity. I had received a clearer glimpse of the good that human beings have the capacity for, despite limitations dictated by finiteness, selfishness, or even malice. In the course of my teaching, in the course of new friendships in all the different places, and even on my interview trips, I had had human interactions that had left an impression both dulcet and hopeful. And in the course of all that, I myself, severely limited in my own capacity for goodness, had perhaps become a marginally better human being.