The wife at the wall

Yue Yangzi was studying away from home when his wife was visiting her parents. He was away a long time and missed her, and one day he came home early, before he'd finished.

His wife was at the loom, a bolt of silk in progress. She asked what he'd come home for. He said: I missed you.

She took a knife and cut the silk.

He was shocked. She said: this silk grows thread by thread, inch by inch, and only after it's finished can it be a piece of cloth worth using. You've interrupted your studies out of missing me, which means you'll never be finished.

If you want to go far, don't stop halfway.

He went back and finished, and later became a scholar who mattered.

Almost everything I've seen about persistence gets this story wrong by assuming the stakes are obvious. They're not. The interesting question is what lets a person name the interruption clearly rather than disguising it as a virtue.

Nostalgia is a lovely word and it is also a competitor. Missing someone can interrupt a commitment while feeling like evidence of love.

Both of them were right in this story, and the solution wasn't to stop feeling it. It was to name which one was going to govern the month.

Which interruption are you currently calling a priority?

MOJOWAY's weekly check-in asks which interruption you are calling a priority this month.