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  Learning to be grateful
()
03/07/2003
On February 24, Fudan University won the Chinese round of the worldwide Jessup Moot Court Competition in Beijing, The well-known contest is set up by the moot court of the current International Court of Justice sitting in the Hague, in the Netherlands, and named after Philip Jessup, one of the justices of the ICJ.

Thus, Fudan University will advance to Washington for the international round, marking the first time the Chinese mainland has ever joined the Jessup community in recent years and also constituting one of the greatest landmarks in China's academic development of public international law.

I have been fortunate enough to be one of the team members. This event means a lot to many people. What it mostly meant to me was not that we have won, that we had defeated all the other Chinese teams or that we would advance to Washington, but something else.

I am not a person who has experienced big successes and I believe many of those reading this newspaper are not either.

We are just ordinary people. So when ordinary people enjoy a big success, they tend to think that it has been bestowed upon them alone, at least subconsciously.

However, we get closer to the essence of life if we take another perspective - that is, seeing how much of our successes or possessions have been contributed by those around us.

Think about it and you find an amazing world that could change your whole perspective on life. Use a magnifying glass if you have eye problems.

In our case, our success was owed to the competition sponsor, the national sponsor being Renmin University, whose faculty had contributed enormously to this competition.

Our success was also due to my distinguished team members, who have been devoted and committed, to our excellent coach, who has provided help all along the way, to our college, which has given us every support and encouragement and to all those students who have helped us in rehearsals, asking nothing more in return than our team's success.

When we took to the road, even our competitors helped us grow and contributed to our success. Without them we would not have tapped our potential or deepened our research as far as we did. So part of our success also goes to them.

I believe happiness is not only what we have got, but what we have shared.

I can hardly imagine that any person can be happy if he or she cannot appreciate and be grateful to other people.

Things will be better if we learn to appreciate and be grateful, whether for a beautiful face or home or for golden opportunities, for a beautiful bride or car or for silvery smiles. Because in a sense, all those things are not what we are entitled to, or entitled to without the need to pay the price.

In fact, that price is to a large extent shared by our parents, our colleagues, our friends, our teachers and all those ordinary people around us. All those things we already have are the outcome of many sincere and enterprising efforts.

It is the case with our success and also the case with everyone. To learn to appreciate and learn to be grateful for what we have in life is by no means something meaningless, something like vacuous moral preaching or something steeped in hypocrisy.

It is a fact of life, which you may not see when it is an eye-blinding sunbeam; but which you will see when it turns into a rainbow behind even a tiny drop of water.

   
       
               
         
               
   
 

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