2025: Rapid Growth Through Challenges
The lunar year 2025 is drawing to a close. This year has not been easy for me; the road has been full of various challenges, but precisely because of these challenges I grew rapidly once again in middle age. At the turn of the year, I would like to write this article to record the inner journey of this year.
Several important things happened to me this year:
First, at the age of 46, I took the 2025 national unified college entrance examination (gaokao) in my home province of Hubei; my score ranked in the top 50% of the province, and I was admitted to the clinical medicine program (Western medicine) of a medical university in the north. To protect personal privacy and avoid excessive disturbance during my studies, the name of the school will not be disclosed before graduation.
I have already completed the first semester at school. This semester of full-time study has been very rewarding. Although, with increasing age, my physical functions have inevitably declined compared with the past, my learning ability has not noticeably deteriorated. This may be related to the fact that I have never stopped studying over the years; use it or lose it—with long-term mental exercise, the learning and research ability of middle-aged people does not show obvious decline.
The day before the gaokao, my father fell and fractured a bone, and I carried him to the hospital. The night before the exam, because I had to care for my father, I did not sleep a wink; during the gaokao I relied on a few cups of coffee to stay awake, and surprisingly I passed smoothly. Had it been me in my youth, I probably could not have been so calm and composed.
Second, because of a traffic accident in 2023, I fought my first-ever lawsuit with an insurance company—more precisely, I was a defendant for the first time. Fortunately, I won at the first instance, second instance and retrial. This was a hard-fought case; before mine, all traffic accident disputes in Beijing similar to mine had ended with the party in a situation like mine losing. But as a legal novice, inspired by some friends who studied law, I consulted the materials and successfully won every battle.
When I received the court summons, I consulted the judges and lawyer friends around me; without exception, the local judges and lawyer friends in Beijing all thought it impossible for me to win. The results from querying AI also said I would surely lose. But after studying the judgments of similar cases across the country, I believed I had a chance of winning, so I insisted on pursuing the lawsuit.
I won the case with rigorous defense. The plaintiff would not accept it and repeatedly appealed; the case was finally retried by the Beijing High People's Court, which still ruled in my favor. This also means that similar traffic accident disputes in Beijing will henceforth follow this line of reasoning in their judgments, correcting the past malpractice of inconsistent rulings in similar traffic disputes between motor vehicles and non-motor vehicles or pedestrians. This correction may be a first in the whole country as well.
Third, according to Beijing's spouse-dependent household registration policy, my household registration was transferred from my home province of Hubei to Beijing. Now, in the legal sense, I am already a Beijinger rather than a Hubei native. After more than half a year of running around, this matter has also been settled. After moving my household registration to Beijing, my future social security and various exams will be much more convenient.
Fourth, at the end of the year, I obtained my driver's license. I have been in three traffic accidents that nearly cost me my life, leaving a deep shadow in my heart. For a long time, my family and I all believed that I was not destined to get a driver's license in this life; this had even become the greatest psychological barrier of my life. But when I decided to break through this psychological barrier, I smoothly obtained the driver's license. I passed all four stages of the test on the first attempt, and Subject 2—the most difficult—scored full marks, which I had not expected.
Getting the license also made me realize that people have the ability to break through their own psychological barriers. Everyone may set self-limits in some respects; such self-imposed limits caused by fear often hinder the full expression of a person's potential.
Many of the things that happened this year required a great deal of effort to complete, but in the end they were all accomplished smoothly.
At the turn of the year, I returned to my rural hometown. My third uncle is in his final throes; his boat of life is perhaps only a few dozen hours from shore. Although his consciousness is no longer clear, he can still recognize me, his nephew. Sitting by his bedside, looking at my third uncle, now skin and bones, death once again presented itself before me in a very concrete way.
My third uncle was diagnosed with intestinal cancer with liver metastasis more than a year ago. Because he himself did not accept TCM or integrated TCM-Western treatment, the treatment over this past year plus has been purely Western medicine, carried out at the best Grade-A tertiary hospital in our province. Medicine is so powerless against this disease; every time I witness such moments, I can only sigh that humanity is still too small, and before the irresistible laws of nature we can only stand helpless.
Even so, being human, while our health still permits, we can only press forward. As a middle-aged man, even though we have already seen the nihilistic side of life, we still understand that to survive we must strive to overcome all kinds of difficulties and fulfill our responsibilities to ourselves, our families and society. Because we are indeed the mainstay of society; only by moving forward can we solve all kinds of problems.