Can it be uplifting to lower one's sights?

At Avot 1:4 Yose ben Yo’ezer Ish Tzeredah offers advice that most of us are unlikely these days to follow literally:

“Let your home be a meeting place for the wise; wrestle in the afar raglehem (“dust of their feet”), and drink their words in thirstily”.

With so many conveniently-located synagogues and batei midrash in almost every Jewish community that a talmid chacham is likely to visit, we only infrequently have the chance to host meetings of the sort of wise person that the mishnah contemplates. And even if we do, the likelihood is that any dust at floor level will be cleaned up well ahead of the event. So if we are to look for practical advice in this teaching, we must look further than a literal meaning for it.

For those of us who regularly hang out in their synagogue or bet midrash, whether to pray, to attend shiurim or just to be sociable and catch up on the latest local news, the place is a sort of home-from-home—and it is almost by definition a meeting place for the wise (or at least for the presumptively wise). But what about wrestling in the dust? How do we manage that?

R’ Yisrael Hopstein (the Kozhnitz maggid, author of the Avodat Yisrael on, inter alia, Pirkei Avot) offers an ingenious suggestion. The “feet” to which R’ Yose refers are not literally feet at all, but a metaphor for those aspects of a wise person’s conduct that are at the bottom of the holiness spectrum: earthly matters that are no less important than one’s lofty spiritual aspirations because we serve our Creator through our material physicality too. We should get to grips with the way a wise person deals with these apparent trivia since even the casual conversations and apparently insignificant actions of such a person can teach one a great deal.

I rather like this approach because I have on many occasions found myself either promoting or relegating a rabbi in my personal hierarchy on account of throwaway lines or small gestures that have either impressed or disappointed me. Is it pettiness on my part that I rate a rabbi more highly when I see him returning a book to its proper place on the shul bookshelf after he has finished his shiur, or that I find it hard to respect a rabbi who carries on speaking for several minutes after his shiur should have ended, while people who turn up for prayers are kept waiting? Should my response to his teachings be affected by my delight that he helps an old man on with his overcoat, or my horror when I find him checking his smartphone while using a urinal?

These things are the afar raglehem and they are important to me. Are they important to you too?