On Friday we had a midterm for our class on the Five Elements — Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. In some ways it has been a turning point, or a point of realization for me.

School, for a long time, has meant essentially one thing: Working hard for something that is ultimately irrelevant to my life. Life, on the other hand, has long meant working according to my real self and my true passions regardless of what other pressures or expectations are brought to bear on me. The division was necessary and seemed permanent.

When I was at Stanford, I took the easy way out, mostly the easier classes that let me slide by. On rarer occasions, I took classes that interested me more; but for the most part, I found my fulfillment in extracurriculars such as martial arts and nature awareness.

Since starting school for Chinese medicine, slowly I’ve come to experience more of a bridging of this gap between my real self and academics.

The midterm on Friday was not particularly difficult, but it was hard. It was an essay test, and if I had had another half hour, I would have written blazingly good essays. Instead, I tried to cram in too much information and descriptive language, so I’m not sure how good those essays were.

For me, however, the point is not how good the grade was. It was that I actually cared how I did.

Oh, I’ve always cared what grade I got. I was valedictorian in high school and have very rarely gotten anything less than a B (except for getting an F on an assignment in 6th grade health class; I thought that would ruin me!).

But now it’s dawning on me that this is for real. Regardless of what grade I get on the test, I’m realizing that the academic success I achieve also has direct bearing on my success as a practitioner of Chinese medicine.

For someone who took advanced calculus at the local college while I was still in high school, and never found any reason, or even desire, to use it as anything other than bragging rights — this is something new.

Now I’m becoming genuinely excited. I’m finding myself buying and reading books on Chinese medicine that have nothing to do with coursework, just because I want it to make more sense. It’s all becoming so fascinating to me, I’m seeing the concepts of the medicine seep into my understanding of my health and the use of my self in my everyday life. I’m even having dreams about this stuff. It’s all so stimulating on a number of levels, from the spiritual to the physical.

This is what real learning feels like. It’s expansive and open-ended; it touches me and helps me grow as a person.

I’ve experienced real learning before. In the past, though, my learning has been in the context of gaining something purely for myself. From martial arts to primitive skills to meditation, those skills have limited direct application to interacting with society — though they are among the things that are crucial to a healthy spirit.

This is different. I will eventually learn to feel a person’s pulse, to look at her face, to peer at her tongue, to ask about night sweats and bowel movements and pain, and then to help her to feel better and maybe gain some awareness about her life. This learning is for service and connection to the external world, and it’s real; and that combination is new to me.

No doubt as I open to the external world in this way, I may suffer, I may be blown back and close the door again for a while. But this is exciting, and for the moment, I appreciate the opening of the door.