The fallen leaves sweeping/Carlos Pueblo

 The fallen leaves sweeping/Carlos Pueblo

Every year I must help to sweep fallen leaves in the front otherwise the street is getting ugly in compare with my neighbors. There are two huge trees on my front yard and leaves fallen on two separate time. The sugar gum leaves in the fall while the Arizona oak in the spring. Most of my neighbors hire landscape people to clean the mess while I still sweep the street with a simple broom and collect leaves into trash cans to be picked up by the trash. I was trained very well at schools in Taiwan. The student before the college is required to sweep the ground and the floor to make the campus clean. Also in the army, sweeping is one of the two basic training and the other one is the marching.

Chinese authority takes sweeping  seriously because that the national philosophy is based on the Confucianism. The emperors and their dynasties had rules China based on it for more than two thousand years, even in Taiwan when Chiang Kai-sek exiled to the island, he strictly enforced the Confucianism. The philosophy is merged into the Chinese language art lessons throughout all schools system. I still can recite the famous sentences about the sweeping at the beginning of any school learning. It says that the sweeping to cope with advances and retreats for the first lesson at the school then the second one is not that famous yet mentioning something about the civic manners, music, archery, reading, and the mathematics, etc. 

The Confucian scholar Chu Hsi ( 1130-1200) has promoted this sweeping discipline into one of the Confucius's writing, the Great Learning of four books. He believes that the sweeping can mature a learner how to behave himself either in advances or in retreats. There is a piece on the Great Learning which is said, there is nothing more visible that what is in secret, and nothing more manifest than what is in minute. Therefore, the gentleman is watchful over himself while he is alone. I have not learned anything like this in my western philosophical learning so far in my life.

One of my neighbors came to great me for my sweeping effort and I told him that the sweeping fallen leaves like gathering dollars bills. He laughed. He hires people to manage his yard and street.