The Pursuit of One Good Thing

Where were you a year ago? What were you doing? Who were you, and what did you want? I was in Tainan, a city in southern Taiwan, knocking on doors and talking to people about God in Chinese.

“Hi, we’re missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and we share a message about peace and happiness,” we would say. “We’re Buddhist! Go talk to the Christians,” was the most common response. “We’re Christians! Go talk to the Buddhists,” was the second-most common response.

In the course of a week, we chatted with hundreds of people and met with dozens of them to share our beliefs. We pedaled bicycles all over the city from appointment to appointment in the sweltering heat. We got up at 5:30 each morning and when we went to bed at 10:30 each night, we were physically and mentally exhausted. But I loved it.

One year later, I’m back at Harvard. My life today and my life a year ago seem to belong to different worlds. Life at Harvard is, as Saltonstall Professor of History Charles S. Maier of Historical Studies B-54, “World War and Society in the 20th Century: World War II” might put it, war: a strategy of maximizing resources within limitations. There are papers to write and meetings to attend, admissions committees to impress and social appearances to make. There are always accomplishments in the queue and successes on the schedule.

But this modus operandi tends to have a few adverse effects. The first is that we find ourselves constantly trying to win other people’s approval. We campaign for extracurricular positions, we dress nicely for recruiting interviews and we want peers and professors to agree with our arguments. The second is that our resources of such high-intensity time and energy are limited. Sometimes we’re so preoccupied with chasing our own personal cyclones that our friends or others who would be close to us are left behind. The third is that we end up being good at many things, but excelling at none of them. We are confident in our daily living as an investment with dependably high returns, but we have little imagination for some fabulous treasure that may lie buried close at hand. And happiness? It becomes a feat of toil and complication, something acquired through much deduction, derivation and explication, instead of something instinctive that we simply feel.

Life as a missionary was about mastering just one thing by doing it over and over again, day after day. It was the first time in my life when I stopped trying to be good at things and instead just tried to be good. It was very difficult. I struggled to overcome my selfishness, inflexibility and pride. To the extent that I succeeded, I found in myself a desire to serve rather than to demand, an inexhaustible feeling of always having something to give and an utter certainty of the reality of the divine. It was like becoming privy to a set of fantastic secrets that gave one superhuman powers, stripped the world’s miasmas of their potency and made life joyful and whole.

It didn’t matter that people ignored us when we tried to talk to them, or shut the door in our faces. I didn’t feel slighted; I had come to make an offering, not a collection.

It didn’t matter that my companion was a new missionary who burst into tears constantly and said missionary work was too hard. In another life, I might have told her to stop blubbering and get to work, or else politely ignored her while seeing to my own business. But I learned to compromise, to be sympathetic, and to see her welfare as my first concern.

It didn’t matter that most of the people who agreed to hear our message did not, in the end, choose to join our church. Through the process of teaching individuals about God and the purpose of life, I saw lives changed, hope and direction springing out of apathy and confusion in a way that was nothing short of miraculous. I was convinced that I had personally felt the presence of God in moments of astounding clarity that sometimes came in answer to my inner petitions for guidance. I was never happier, and I was able to help others be happy.

It’s good to be back. It’s lovely to have the time and opportunity to study again and to be with good friends. Yet I struggle to retain the soul of my missionary self. During that year and a half, I simply tried to be more like the person God expected me to be: kinder, braver and more generous. It was much easier to daub myself into an active, accomplished “Portrait of the Artist as a Success” than it was to quarry in my soul with a pickaxe, searching for a vein of something precious and rare. But in doing so, I came to know that the work of personal goodness is richer and more real than anything that sparkles on the face of a resume, that life is more extraordinary than the automated tramp from weekend to weekend and that this self of mine is wiser and more capable than the person into whom the weary world would mold me.

There is much to be said for the pursuit of one good thing. One just might find that which one seeks.

Melissa W. Inouye ’01-’03 is an East Asian Studies concentrator in Mather House.