<aside>
<aside>
Order creates harmony
Consideration builds community
Excellence transforms everything
-安天美
</aside>
Adanna stepped into the sweet shop with hunger in her belly and sunshine in her eyes. She had come many weeks before, many months before, watching as this small corner of the world grew from a humble pastry counter into a magnificent supermarket with aisles that seemed to stretch like rivers. The shop had changed its body but not its heart, and Adanna saw with eyes that looked deeply how the same carelessness lived in its new skin.
The people rushed about like fishes disturbed in a pond, each one swimming towards their wants without seeing the others. A woman with bright cloth wrapped around her head stood directly before Adanna, though Adanna had been waiting with the patience taught by her grandmother. The woman did not see Adanna, or perhaps she chose not to see, for there are many ways of blindness in this world that have nothing to do with eyes.
"Excuse me," Adanna said, her voice gentle like morning dew but firm like the roots of an iroko tree. "I was standing here before you came." The woman turned with surprise that someone so young would speak of order in a place where chaos was accepted like weather. This was Adanna's first lesson given that day: that excellence begins with the courage to speak truth, even when the truth seems small.
The space between people waiting holds stories untold. Adanna understood this as she moved to the payment counter, where another line formed like a crooked stream. Here too, a gap existed where people needed to pass, and here too, a woman slipped into this space as if discovering unclaimed land.
"There is a queue," Adanna said, the words coming out clear as river stones. "We are all waiting our turns." The woman looked around, seeing for the first time the pattern that had been invisible to her. She stepped back, finding her place at the end of the line, and something shifted in the air of that place. A silent agreement passed between strangers, an acknowledgment that consideration creates harmony without needing laws or guards to enforce it.
The workers behind the counter laughed among themselves, their hands moving slowly over items that needed counting and recording. They did not see how time stretched like taffy for those waiting, how each moment spent in needless waiting was a moment stolen from a life. Adanna watched them with eyes that did not judge but understood: excellence cannot grow where its seeds are not planted with intention.
Adanna thought of how her father spoke of systems. "A system," he would say, his fingers drawing patterns in the evening air, "is not just machines or rules written on paper. A system is people agreeing how to move together through the world." The pastry shop had created new counters and new pathways, but had not cultivated the human agreement that makes systems truly work.
The young cashier scanned items without looking up, her eyes distant as though dreaming of other places. Adanna wondered what might happen if this girl discovered the magic that lives in full attention, how excellence transforms the ordinary into something worthy of presence. Would the line move faster? Would the customers leave with more than pastries and groceries, perhaps carrying away also the feeling of being truly seen?
Consideration builds bridges between strangers without requiring a single word to pass between them. Adanna saw how each person who pushed ahead tore tiny holes in these invisible connections, while each person who waited patiently helped mend them. Communities are built not just of buildings and roads but of these million daily choices to acknowledge our shared humanity.
Excellence is not a distant mountain that only heroes can climb. It lives in the smallest gestures, the briefest interactions, the moments we might dismiss as unimportant. As Adanna finally reached the counter and paid for her pastry, she smiled fully at the cashier, her eyes meeting the other girl's with genuine warmth. For a moment, something sparked between them, a recognition that even this tiny transaction could hold beauty.
The cashier straightened her shoulders slightly, counted Adanna's change with new precision, spoke her thanks with presence that had been absent before. The transformation was subtle as a change in breeze, but Adanna felt it. One moment of excellence called to another, like birds singing across a forest at dawn.
Walking home, Adanna thought of how many small failures of consideration had collected in that shop like dust in corners. Each person thinking only of themselves, each worker forgetting the purpose of their service, each manager overlooking the experience they created. Yet she also carried hope, knowing that solutions begin with seeing clearly, with naming what is broken, with believing that better ways are possible.
That evening, Adanna gathered her friends under the mango tree that grew in the center of their compound. "Today I saw how excellence dies and how it can be reborn," she told them, her voice carrying the rhythm of storytellers. She spoke of queues and consideration, of systems that worked on paper but failed in human hearts, of how the smallest actions reveal the largest truths about who we are.
"If we care not for order when buying bread, how shall we care for justice when nations tremble?" she asked, echoing her mother's wisdom. "If we cannot see the person standing beside us in a shop, how shall we see the suffering of those far away? Excellence is not what we do when important people are watching, but what lives in our ordinary moments."
Her friends listened, some nodding, some questioning, all thinking of places in their own lives where excellence had been forgotten like an old toy outgrown. Adanna did not pretend to have perfect answers, only the perfect questions that might lead them all toward better ways of moving through the world together.
Excellence is a seed that, once planted, grows in directions we cannot predict. It spreads from person to person like a whispered secret, from moment to moment like light passing through windows. Adanna's simple acts of speaking up for consideration had changed something in that shop, perhaps only for minutes, perhaps for longer. The truth of transformation is that we rarely see its fullest flowering.
The next morning, Adanna returned to the shop with curiosity alive in her heart. Would anything be different? The same cashier recognised her, nodded with a new awareness. The queue formed with slightly more intention, as though yesterday's words still hovered in the air. Excellence had not yet fully arrived, but its possibility now lived where before there had been only acceptance of carelessness.
Adanna understood then that transforming the world happens through persistent attention to the small spaces where humans meet. The pastry shop was just one such space, but in it lived all the challenges and possibilities of our shared existence. To create a better world requires only that we begin exactly where we are, with exactly what is before us, bringing excellence to this moment, then the next, then all the moments that follow.
</aside>
<aside> <img src="/icons/backward_blue.svg" alt="/icons/backward_blue.svg" width="40px" /> Rebuilding Cathedrals
</aside>
<aside> <img src="/icons/forward_blue.svg" alt="/icons/forward_blue.svg" width="40px" /> The Return
</aside>
Motitomi embodies this quote. This space is dedicated to sharing how I cultivate self-sufficiency. I hope you discover your inner strength, and celebrate the beautiful truth that you are enough.