A Heart Far Removed Makes the Place Secluded
After dinner, my wife asked me to go with her to the supermarket to help carry the heavy things. It had been a long time since I had wandered a supermarket or a department store; once inside, I suddenly found this dazzling world of goods alien, almost too bright for me, and I could not quite adjust. The other shops by the supermarket entrance had likewise long ceased to draw my notice—I am the sort of person who can look straight through the outside world and see nothing.
Since immersing myself in medicine, all day long I simply read and write in my study and the library, or go out to see patients. Every day I take two or three walks in one fixed park; year in and year out, I live this utterly simple life. Gradually, before I even noticed, I came to live the kind of life I had long longed for—the "far-removed heart makes the place secluded" life.
Although I now live in Beijing, all the bustle of this city has nothing to do with me. I live only within my own world; now and then two or three old friends drop by and we talk a while. Beyond that, my life is as calm as a still pool. So whether one dwells in seclusion among the hills and woods no longer matters to me; even in the middle of the bustling city, I am still a hermit. Book after book, I finish one at my desk and start the next; when the knowledge I have accumulated is put to clinical use and actually helps a patient, an immense joy and sense of achievement rises within me.
My wife says she feels as if she is raising two sons. This "son" of mine is even more childish than my eleven-year-old boy—utterly clueless about the ways of the world, walling himself off from it. At times she cannot help complaining, but most of the time she has accepted this reality and finally consented to live with me a life of contented poverty. I am deeply grateful. If one day she were to leave before me and no one looked after my daily life, would my survival become unbearably hard? I do not know; I only pray that such a thing never happens.
All day I immerse myself in reading, thinking, judging, and writing; in this state, every care is swept away. My life and its pleasures are, one might say, monotonous to the extreme, yet I take delight in them. I move only within a few places, and each day is simple and fixed in its routine. Of my time in Beijing, more than 99 percent is spent within a two-kilometer radius; I take no vehicles, walking only.
A life without wind or waves, free of cares, the years quietly beautiful—no worries, no entanglements. This feeling of not needing to dwell in the dusty world is truly wonderful.