VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 19, SECTION 1
Time, Energy, Attention
The last five chapters turned education over and over. The five layers of the school, talent, the teacher's way, teaching and steeping, the five great minds of the West, one tree becoming a forest, and the one word the new thing lacks. A great deal of reasoning. This chapter is the closing chapter of the stretch on education. And it has one task. To gather all of it back into your hand. Back into a concrete person, on a concrete day, in every second, and the nine things he can really take hold of. This lesson takes the first three. Time, energy, attention.
You have seen the nine before. The ninth chapter of the first semester said that to see torment clearly is not to curse anyone, but to guard the nine most precious things of a life. Time. Energy. Attention. Relationships. Trust. Health. Skill. Reputation. Feeling. These nine are the whole capital of a person's life. Everything else is a thing outside the body. Only these nine grow on you. The first semester spoke of them as the things not to let torment grind away. This chapter speaks of another thing. Education happens inside these nine. Not inside the school. Not inside the curriculum. Not inside any document from the ministry. Inside these nine. Because the fifteenth chapter said steeping steeps not words but how a person lives. And how a person lives is, in the end, how he spends these nine. Where he puts his time, where he spends his energy, where he sets his attention, how he keeps his relationships, whom he trusts, how he treats his own body, what skill is in his hands, what faith he stands on before others, how he gives and holds his feeling. These nine are the vat. And your child soaks in it.
Take time first. A working person has twenty four hours. Seven go to sleep, two to eating and washing, eight to work, two to the road. What is left? Four or five hours. And those four or five hours are the whole of the day that is truly your own. A child's education is all inside those four or five hours. It is not all inside the school's eight, which are the nursery's work, and the seventeenth chapter said the nursery raises saplings but is not a forest. Those four or five hours are the real soil. And how are they spent today? Look at it honestly. Home, and collapse for ten minutes. Scroll a while. Eat, with half the meal spent on the messages in the group chat. Answer the work messages after, a few still unanswered. Nine o'clock, stand over the child's homework, and by ten the temper is up, and you snap twice. Half past ten, the child asleep, you are free at last, and you scroll shows to half past twelve. Four or five hours, gone like that. And what did the child steep from those four or five hours? He steeped that a grown-up comes home worn out. That a grown-up eats with his eyes on the phone. That a grown-up talks to you with his mind elsewhere. That by ten a grown-up loses his temper. That a grown-up's evening belongs to that screen. None of it is what you meant to teach him. All of it is what he learned. Now change how the same four or five hours are spent. At the table, the phone face down, the family talking on and off about the day at school. After, clearing the bowls together, the child wiping the table, you washing. During the homework, you reading your own book beside him, and when he is stuck you set the book down and look at the problem with him, and not seeing it either is no matter. Half past nine, the family out for a twenty-minute walk, to the tree by the gate of the compound, a few words, and back. The same four or five hours. The same knowledge learned, the same homework done, the same hours spent. And the person steeped is a world apart. The living education of time is not to squeeze out more time. It is how you spend the four or five hours you already have.
Now energy. Time is flat, and an hour is an hour. Energy is not. In a day you have your best two hours, and your worst two. In the best, your head is clear, your temper good, you are patient, your words are not sharp, you can sit still. In the worst, your head is wood, you catch fire at a spark, and one more question from the child and you are irritated. So ask. Your best two hours, to whom did you give them? Most people answer, to the boss. Nine to eleven in the morning, the two clearest hours, spent on the meeting, the report, the client, the thing due next week. And the child gets which hour? Nine at night. You have burned the whole day, and he gets the last of the ash. And so the familiar scene. The child comes over with a problem. You are slumped on the sofa, your eyes on the phone. You say, in a minute. He waits five minutes, comes again. You look up at last, glance at the problem, and say, wasn't this covered in class? He says, I did not follow it. And your fire is up. What were you doing in class? In that second, it is not that you do not love him. It is only that you have no strength left. But the child does not know that. The one message the child takes is this. When I ask a question, my father gets angry. And the next time, he does not ask. See it clearly. It is not that you do not want to teach him. It is that teaching him got scheduled into the very last slot on your table of energy. So what is to be done? This book gives no formula. But a plain line, set here. You may not be able to give him your best two hours. You still have to eat, still have to keep a family. But perhaps you can give him one. Two evenings a week, keep back the best stretch of that day. No phone, no work, no standing over the homework. Just sit there, and do one thing with him. Twice a week, a hundred times a year, a thousand times in ten years. And a thousand times of being fully there, against a thousand times of being out of patience, steep two different people.
Now attention, the least conspicuous of the three, and the fiercest. Time you can read off a clock, energy you can feel. Attention cannot be seen, and yet the child feels it in every second. A scene. An eight-year-old home from school runs up to you, bursting to tell you a thing that happened today. He tells it out of order, and two minutes in he has not reached the point. And you are looking at your phone. You did not walk away. You are listening, in a way. You even said mm twice, and really once. But your eyes did not leave the screen a single time. The child finishes. You say, mm, that is nice, go do your homework. In that second, what happened? The child got no scolding, was not pushed off, was not refused. And yet something in him came down, softly, a notch. He learned one thing. What I have to say is not important. The next time he will still come. The third time, perhaps. By the tenth, he stops coming. And at sixteen, heartbroken, the sky fallen in, he will not come to you. Because at eight he already learned it. There is no use telling. See it clearly. A child's bond with his parents does not break in his sixteenth year. It breaks in his eighth, in those two minutes, a notch at a time. And those two minutes, you do not even remember. The living education of attention is simpler than simple. When the child is talking, turn the phone face down and look at his eyes. Just that. Two minutes. It costs no money, no time, no class, no expert. And it is the most expensive of the nine.
The ancestors set this down more plainly than anyone. Someone asked Confucius what filial care is, and Confucius answered. What is called filial care today means being able to feed one's parents. But even dogs and horses are fed. Without respect, where is the difference? Confucius said it of how a child treats a parent. Turn it around, toward how a parent treats a child, and not one word has to change. Today's parents too can feed. Food, clothes, tuition, the classes, the shoes that cost eight hundred. Fed, and well fed. But the respect? Respect here is not the kowtow, and not politeness. Respect is putting your heart there. It is your eyes on him while he talks. It is hearing a thing that is large to him and small to you as a thing all the same. It is giving him, in earnest, the best stretch of your energy. Feeding costs money. Respect costs the first three of the nine. Time, energy, attention. Twenty five centuries ago, in one line, Confucius pulled these two apart. A child who was fed, and a child who was raised with respect, are two different people.
So here is where this section leaves us. The first three of the nine. Time, and your four or five leftover hours are the real soil, the same hours steeping in one way that a grown-up comes home to a phone and in another that the things of a home are done together, the education not a squeezing out of more but a spending of what you have. Energy, and your best two hours, given mostly to the boss while the child gets the ash, so that a question draws fire and next time he will not ask, and though you cannot give it all, two evenings a week you perhaps can, a thousand times present against a thousand times impatient making two people. Attention, and where your eyes are when he talks, the bond breaking not at sixteen but at eight, in two minutes you will not remember. Confucius, able to feed and able to respect, feeding costing money and respect costing time and energy and attention, the fed child and the respected child two people. That is the start of the nineteenth stake. Education is not in the school, it is in the few hours you have left in a day, and not in how much money you spent on him, but in whether you put your heart there. So the next three? Relationships, trust, health. These three the child sees whole, with never a word from you. The next section takes them up. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.