Here’s my seventh essay on the Nine Noble Virtues.

Industriousness 

It’s interesting that industrious ends up being the essay I write today, of all days, considering how much work I’ve done today. Industriousness is the willingness to work hard at the tasks at hand. But it goes deeper than that. I don’t think industriousness is just hard work because anyone can work hard – I think it’s hard work with a good attitude. Being negative while working sets a bad example, so I think it’s important to do the best I can to be positive when I work. I don’t always succeed, of course, but I do my best to maintain a positive attitude.

Today was interesting, though. I ended up having quite a bit of work to do. At my job, I ended up replacing some old documents and taking inventory, which took around an hour and a half. Since I do a work study, I don’t have many hours of work, so I did that and left to go discuss my math homework with my teacher. I’m currently taking precalculus, and we just started the unit on conic sections, and it’s a little bit difficult to grasp. I’m confident I will understand it, though, as long as I work at it until it “clicks.”

After that, I ran into my friend, Holly, who had just taken a Stats test. She asked if I wanted to get lunch, and I agreed, so I had a nice lunch break with her and helped her de-stress a little. She has pretty bad test anxiety, even though she understands the subject fine, and a break from schoolwork was exactly what she needed.

When I got back from my lunch break, I finished up my last hour of work for the day, then headed to my precalculus class. I struggled through the lab the teacher assigned, but I kept at it until I finished it. Then I went to Spanish, and we never really do much in my Spanish class, so that was fine.

Afterwards, I went to the Academic Support Center (or tutoring place) with Ben, my co-president in the Global Students Club. We spent three hours coming up with the fall schedule for our club and creating flyers and infographics for the Spring Fling tomorrow. Even though it was a lot of work, I had a lot of fun working on the stuff for the club. We have a lot of fun events planned for the fall semester, and I’m looking forward to seeing how things turn out.

I’ve also been working pretty diligently on this blog, and, thus, my own spiritual studies, though I hesitate to call them something so serious. But I have fun with it, which is the real point I’m making here. Work doesn’t have to be serious – it can also be fun. I think that’s also true about spiritual work, and, in fact, I think that it’s almost required.

I actually have to work at having fun sometimes because I can get way too serious – I actually had a friend tell me that she wanted to call me Serene Moon (back in elementary school when we were all obsessed with Mercedes Lackey books) because I was always brooding. I think it’s a little ironic, that I have to work at having fun, but I mean, hey – life wouldn’t be life if it wasn’t full of ironic twists and turns.