Hubris

Since I read a Chinese novel about an all-powerful kongfu disciple, I had set him as the person that I look up towards. Although he is only a fictional character, his one act in a battle inspired me to be better. While this character is mostly very humble, the scene which I remember him from is one of the most humble acts of his. What he did was very simple, he simply saved everyone that is fighting in an all-way death battle while keeping himself safe. Without him, all the people in the scene would just have died because of that fact that they keep attacking each other. His superiority upon all others inspired me to be just like him. What's more is that he never try to display his power. Unless something resorts to violence, he would rather be called the weakest man alive then demonstrate how powerful he actually is.

Since the day I read that book, I tried to better myself, to learn more skills, to be good at more aspects. I dreamt of one day that I could hide my well-trained skill. What I always tell myself is that you need to have something to hide to actually hide stuff. Till this day, the things that I picked up is my drawing abilities, my coding skills and some of my musical abilities. While none of my abilities are anywhere near perfection, they are a lot better than what I started off with. My art receives compliments without me even trying, I am able to tell others that I self-taught myself coding and more. Looking back at everything that I have learned, I am very pleased with everything. To the 10-year-old me, this is the goal that I have long been wanting to achieve. But like everything, our desire adapts to what we have. The more that we possess, the more that we want. Now, I want to have a steady source of income that does not revolve around labor. Being a cashier and having a long-term source of income is lame to me. Being a typist that mindlessly type is lame to me. Just selling lemonade in the front yard to people that are interested just because you are a kid is lame to me. With that said, if you give me any of those jobs for me to do right now, I would fail them entirely and get fired probably within a week. I could not talk to strangers fluently, nor could I type 100 words per minute, nor could I even get my guts to put up a lemonade stand. The things that I despise of are the exact things that I could not achieve. This is also the same with art pieces. While I critic the arts that I see and tell myself that I do not want to become the artists that produce those arts. I myself could not draw those myself. I am constantly petty and I don't always do things about me. I am getting off topic, so I am just going to summarize myself here, although I have been trying to improve myself constantly, I still achieved a little and could not do the things that I want to.

On top of who I want to hide skills that I have, I have followed a saying in the bible for a very long time. Although I don't read the bible a lot, this exact one line from it changed me drastically. This line illustrated that you shouldn't use evil to combat evil. If anything, anyone does something bad to you, you should never get revenge on them. If you are not able to return that evil action with love, you should leave it and present that nothing happened. This one line had guided me so far that a lot of people from my school in Shanghai treats me as the kindest kid in the entire grade. Classmates from other grades came to know me like that as well. Although my classes are all in the lowest level, smart kids treated me with respect. To be honest, this may just be my hallucination, but this is what I feel. I never cared if anyone makes fun of me, and most of the time, I end up helping those who do.

The reason that I brought this all up is that I again for the numerous times in the school see people just trying to be ahead of the teacher.  I myself is guilty of this as well, but when others do it, it is more present in my eyes. And since I am bothered by it, I wanted to say something about it so this is it because I am too lazy.

Another practice sketches that I did in the span of 3 days