Adapt to Change and Settle the Self

"Swiftly the years flow on, onward like a torrent." As one member of the living world, our finite lives are always finite. As Guan Hanqing wrote in his qu verse: "In the end, this body cannot escape that one day"—the Reaper spares no one. Especially in an era like the present, with viruses lurking on every side, everyone faces at any moment the risk of being swallowed by a virus; people can all the more appreciate the fragility of life.

But as living beings, the most distinctive feature of human beings is that we have irritability toward the environment; it is only that different people differ in their ability to cope with environmental change. Viruses are mutating, the environment is changing, and people must also change in order to adapt to the environment and survive. If one cannot adapt to environmental change and remains as free-spirited as in the past, one may in the end be eliminated by the environment, becoming a victim of the natural law of the survival of the fittest—not even living out the natural lifespan that nature has given us. Such things are countless in the history of human survival. We think we are the masters of our own bodies, but this is not so: many other organisms that live parasitically within us can also rule over our life and death.

Present-day human society has undergone unprecedented upheaval. In a globalized age where information flows with great ease, human society has encountered a prolonged plague that still shows no end, and the fundamental interests of many people have been harmed. Even in the richest countries, about 9% of people go hungry; the situation in poorer countries is even worse. It is therefore hardly surprising that all kinds of noisy voices rise one after another.

In response, we must understand, and deeply recognize, the complexity and cruelty of reality. I believe that no one in the world has the ability to stop the various extreme ideologies that emerge under the impact of the plague on global society. Behind every extreme ideology, a special interest group is struggling hard. Everyone is like people shipwrecked on the sea, each trying every means to save themselves. We cannot say that our own self-rescue is right and that others’ self-rescue is wrong. Right and wrong have never been the most important thing; the groups and individuals in the human world care about their own vital interests and inner needs.

Human society is not always in a state of progress; history develops in a spiral, and sometimes human society also regresses. I believe that for a long time to come, human society as a whole will, in rationality, be in a stage of great regression, and human inclusiveness will not be as good as in the past few decades.

Many people are not willing to sit down and discuss right and wrong; they only want to vent their emotions. Still others exploit various emotions to reap political and economic gain. And some people are used by others, swept up in all kinds of emotions, idle all day long, knowing only to look everywhere for a place to vent their feelings—to pour it out and feel relieved, and to pour it out again and feel relieved again. From historical experience, when society is in such a state of chaos and extremism, many people become victims of social emotion. Social cooperation becomes difficult, and issues that truly concern everyone’s vital interests become hard to resolve.

We humans still have a long, muddy road to walk. Only after crossing the current swamp can human society return to a normal, basically rational state, and the friendliness between people recover. In this process, the more people who calm down amid the boiling din, the faster the problems will be solved.

Calm means looking at problems without emotion, and also looking at others’ emotions without emotion. Calm requires settling, and a clear judgment of the situation. People wrapped in emotion, or wrapped up by emotion, do not easily settle down to think independently, and so do not easily form a clear judgment of the situation; they always fritter away their time in meaningless uproar.

I no longer want to discuss the hot issues of the day, because I do not want to become an emotional fool. I am willing to spend some time thinking about the essence behind various phenomena, and from that seek techniques for meeting change with the unchanging. People often say to live in the present; there is nothing wrong with that. But our vision must not stop at the present. If we can only see the present, we actually cannot live the present well either. We may do many foolish things in the present, leaving many regrets for the future, or even lose our lives in the present because of our own ignorance. We should also see through the essence of the various chaos of the present, and from it see the direction forward.

Beyond this, everyone should as far as possible return to their own inner world, settle down, and keep learning and thinking in order to improve themselves. One day, when we have done so, we will realize that everything we did under the sway of emotion was meaningless.