At the age of 15,

darrell introduced azim to psychology and sparked an intellectual curiosity in him. Eventually, azin became a teacher himself, a psychology professor.

In my intro psychic class, the last class is always a class on positive psychology. And i always leave the students with these three tasks, which have been empirically demonstrated to actually improve people's happiness forr several months. And one of them is this thing called a gratitude visit. Basically, what you do is you pick an unsung hero, and you write 350 words thanking them. And then, if you can see them in person, you go up to them and read this. And it turns out to be this extremely powerful visit, this extremely powerful moment for both people. And every year i would think of the same guy, this english teacher from way back in the day. But every year, even though i was asking my students to do this, i was a big hypocrite because i never did the gratitude visit for him. In

20 18, azim moved back to vancouver, and one day he decided to go to the beach.

And it is a clothing optional beach. It's beach got such a lively culture there i was down there clothed. And so there he was, completely naked, throwing a frisby. And i thought, now's my chance, and my chance is coming when he has no clothes on. And this is very awkward, because usually you don't see your tenth great english teacher completely naked, and when you do, it's awkward to approach him. And so then i kind of, i thought, should i go? Should i should i go talk to him now? And the awkwardness was too much. So i didn't talk to him until later. He put on his sorong because that's what people seemed to wear on this beach. And was walking by, and i said, hey, darrell. And he recognized me. He remembered me. And i gave him what i'd been preparing in my head for years, which is this 350 words statement of gratitude, which was about the inspiration that teachers and students who eventually become teachers passe down to each other, that i now got to play a similar role for my students that he played for me. It gives some sort of meaning to the struggles that i had. I don't like to romanticize what i went through too much, but the ability to potentially help some people make all of that worth it. And i think it was the same thing for him. He he was able to channel his own struggles into something which made it worth it by helping other people. It's a, it's a paying it back thing, right?

Azim sherif, he is a psychology professor at the university of british columbia and a former guest on our other pat cast, hidden brain. You can hear him in our episode titled creating god. We reached out to darrell to ask for his thoughts on azim. He tells us that azim was one of the brightest minds he ever worked with in nearly forty years of teaching. And he says that azims thank you at the beach that day made him remember why he became a teacher in the first place. If you enjoy to day's episode, please reach out to a current or former educator in your own life and share your gratitude with them. To hear more stories like to day's, please be sure to subscribe to the show so you don't miss the bonous episodes coming out this week. I'm shanker ve dante, susan