28 Jul 2026
Mundane tasks done with innate knowledge
It’s closing to a month since I gradually moved away from being the full-time daycare for my son. I promised myself this would be a conscious move to eventually remove my full-time scaffold from his development and slowly delegate it out to others. Time has not grown any more, neither has life become any less busy. Instead, I am still jumping from one task to another.
Peculiarly, after doing this for a month, I noticed something. I am still shouting at my son to complete his homework after his online class, yet the feeling is different. I don’t hold it internally anymore. Before, I would hold it emotionally, either complaining silently in my heart or later to my husband that the amount of homework was overwhelming, that the school was crazy to have a system revolving around nothing but homework, or that our son was simply slower in understanding. But now, I just hold it in stride. This exercise book is done. This correction is done. Next homework, bring it on. Another one, bring it on.
Perhaps it is also because my son’s ADHD and focus have improved tremendously. He is still difficult to call over to do his homework, but in the early days it used to be one word written before running away, saying he was too tired, or simply ignoring us altogether. Now it is more like writing a full sentence before wandering off or jumping onto the bed, then I call him back again. Those days, thirty minutes would pass with not even two sentences completed. Now, within an hour, he can complete three or four pieces of homework.
I used to think I was simply solving problems. Sleep, nutrition, learning, focus. One issue after another. Looking back now, perhaps something else was happening at the same time. While I thought I was patiently peeling away the layers of my son’s development, those same layers were quietly peeling something away from me. The complaints became fewer. The resistance became less. The work itself never became easier, but somewhere along the way I stopped measuring how difficult it felt and simply did the next thing that needed to be done.
Perhaps this is my own understanding of Wang Yangming. I did not sit down and cultivate the right mindset before acting. I simply kept acting because the work needed to be done. After helping my son through an hour of homework, I walked out of his room without feeling overwhelmed or frustrated by how strenuous the session had been. Instead, I simply moved on to my next task—posting a video on Xiaohongshu for my gallery exhibition. It was just the next thing to do. Perhaps that is all in a day’s work: mundane, repetitive, yet done with one’s innate knowledge, 良知.
Leave a Reply