One: "Do you believe in God?"
Two: "Do you believe in Tao?"
One: "I asked you first, man."
Two: "That depends on your definition of time."
One: "Dude...okay, well, what's Tao then."
Two: "What's God?"
One: "...So Tao is God?"
Two: "Tao is Tao, and God is God. We can't say that God is Tao or Tao is God unless we know what Tao and God are."
One: "So...what's Tao?"

Perspective is what can change a wrong question into a correct question, even if the words of the question are the exact same. Because man cannot agree on what God is, yet worships it, Tao is not God. But because Tao is in all things, the atoms of physical and spiritual, God is a source of Tao. A square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square.

The God children make up the area inside the box, their opponents comprise the line that forms the box, and the Taoists are oblivious, knowing not a necessity for such pleasantries as the clearly defined.

"Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."

It'd been a long while since I'd heard that wretched saying. Whoever first said that and all the people who honestly believe it must have really goddamn cushy lives. I could easily have stayed on at the newspaper I was with and made thirty grand more a year than I ever will as a teacher. I could've been published every day, influenced the way people thought about things, had my own desk.

At age seventeen, I was already doing. And it was one of the worst career decisions I'd ever made. The only thing good about taking that job was that it made me realize that I would never in my life work a stupid desk for eight hours a day.

No matter that as a teacher I'll probably never get published. No matter that I'll be relatively poor, or that after putting in eight hours a day I'll have to bring home mounds of paperwork. No matter that after becoming emotionally attached to my students I'll have to see them get addicted to drugs and abused by their parents and die in car wrecks.

None of that matters, because if I really cared about making society a better place, I'd let less skilled people educate our children while I slacked off in the business department of the Daily Tribune, right?

Idiots.

I will teach because it's in my blood. One of my grandfathers was a professor, an uncle, my mother, two aunts. My other grandfather taught my grandmother math so she could be a real-estate agent, though neither had higher education.

I will teach because I'm not second rate. More than the names of authors and their titles flow through me. I will not be a regurgitated degree, and my students will be successes because they will not be comprised of regurgitated information.

I will teach because 'doing' is taking the easy way out. Doing is not sacrificing for anyone. Doing is furthuring only your own personal wants. I could be an editor or novelist or playwright. I really could. But those people who are doing and not teaching are only able to do so because of the ones who sacrificed the ability to do in order to teach them.

Underappreciation is just part of being a teacher in this hemisphere, I guess.

I start at 1pm today. I'm certain the children I help will be glad that I am there with them, teaching and not doing.