I watched a show interviewing a well-known professor (Professor Yu Dan) from China, who recently held a series of lectures in interpreting the Anelects of Confucius. Anyways, neither was she talking about Confucius in that interview nor I am going to discuss about Confucius here.
There were a few interesting little stories that this female professor brought up that I really liked and have inspired me. On top of that I managed to work out my facial muscles and while watching the light-hearted interview show. But I just want to highlight one here.
This lady professor reminisced a little incident that she learnt from her daughter. One day while having a nanny looking after her few months old baby, the nanny pulled out a lot of toys on the bed. The whole bed was flooded with different variety of toys, colorful soft toys, expensive play toys, toys that making funny sounds to attract people and ex cetera. The nanny took out all those toys and showed them to the few-month-old one by one telling her, "Look at this baby, this is so beautiful, play with this..." The baby did not even look at the toys in front of her. In fact all she cared was to play with a water bottle that happened to be there on her bed. No matter how hard the nanny tried to distract her attention by tempting her with all sort of fancy toys, the baby remained indulging herself playing with the bottle.
"We can be very subjectives at times. We tend to make others believe and follow what we think is best. We (the adults) think the expensive, colorful toys are interesting. Yet this was not what the baby thought. She probably was thinking that water bottle was the best toy at that time."
After hearing her story, it actually reminded me such experiences I have had in life. Parents thinking kids should do certain things because the parents think that would be the best for the kids. We want our friends/family/significant other to do certain things, telling them that would be the best for them. Yet little did we realize something we think is the best might not be the case in other's mind. The best thing is still to respect others' decisions. If it involves us, we could discuss about it but we still have to respect the final decision, which might not be something we would agree. After all you just want the person to be truly happy in what they are doing.
♥ every page of my imagination
