All Shall Pass; Enjoy the Happiness That Comes Easily

The winter jasmine in Beijing has bloomed, and the river has thawed. I live by a river in Beijing. The water in this river is said to be the drinking water of Beijing residents, so the river environment is well protected; the water here is cleaner than the river water in my hometown thirty years ago.

After dinner, our family often walks along the river. On these two evenings, we have seen people on the riverbank wearing headlamps and using fishing gear to catch loaches from the river. The embankment of this river is a recreational area open to nearby residents and does not prohibit angling or using small gear to catch fish. Once we spent about twenty minutes watching a fellow from our hometown of Xiaogan, Hubei, work; we struck up a conversation, and he taught us how to use light to find and identify loaches and how to catch them.

It was a very enjoyable experience. That very day we spent over forty yuan online ordering the same gear he uses. We plan to, like him, now and then catch some loaches and small fish for a treat—our family is not a vegetarian household; it is just that I personally prefer a plant-based diet.

I found a long-missed happiness in this way of life. Hubei is called the land of fish and rice; as a child, I loved fishing and catching fish most of all. But after the summer before my first year of high school, my older brother forcibly broke my fishing addiction (he was mainly pressuring me to study), and I never took up the hobby again. Yet watching the fellow catch fish this time stirred up enthusiasm in our whole family.

We have lived by this river for twelve years now (from 2009 to 2021). Why is it only now that I have suddenly become interested in catching fish? Perhaps it is because, after the pandemic brought profound changes to society as a whole, our hearts have become much quieter than before, shifting from the relentless pursuit of career success to an appreciation of life's pleasures.

This is a very easy small happiness, just like renting a small vegetable plot for over three thousand yuan a year to grow vegetables—both are easily achieved goals. The happiness these small joys bring us is very real. Beijing is a very fast-paced city; our busy lives left us no time to switch to another mode of living. Now, unexpectedly, we have found so many small pleasures.

It has been a long time since I returned to Hubei. We also miss the specialty foods of our hometown. My wife learned online how to make Hubei's Three-Fresh Bean-Skin. Though the shape is not the prettiest, the taste truly rivals that of Wuhan's Cai Lin Ji. My son and I ate heartily and clapped in praise.

Though we do not know when this pandemic will end, looking over all of human history, similar disasters are beyond count, and each time people have ultimately survived. This is a hardship hard for all living things to avoid as they exist in nature; unfortunate though it is, we cannot fight the laws of nature.

I have calmly accepted this disaster and the effects it has brought me. Adapting to environmental change is the innate ability and fate of living things; if we did not possess this ability and accept this fate, we would be eliminated by nature. After reading some works on biology and human history, I can face humanity's current predicament with equanimity.

As an insignificant individual, the best I can do right now is to find joy amid hardship. I love the poetry of Tao Yuanming and Su Shi, admiring how, in lives full of misfortune, they still maintained an open and free attitude. Some readers also appreciate my articles and my attitude toward life. Our world has always been deeply divided and quarrelsome, but fortunately there are always some people whose values so closely match ours that when we see them, it is like seeing another self; this gives us great comfort and makes us feel we are not alone.

The pandemic has also kept me away from libraries and bookstores for a long time, but it has freed up much time to digest the books I bought in the past. Though my collection is not particularly large, it is truly substantial, and its range is broad—more than a lifetime can finish. Now I finally have time to digest these books.

I used always to want to settle down and do some systematic comparative research on treatment regimens for cancer and its complications, but I was always frustrated by the heavy clinical workload and insufficient study time, making it hard to settle into research. But after the pandemic, with much more time, I was actually able to fulfill an old wish; the reading notes and excerpts I have accumulated during this period run to hundreds of thousands of characters. I plan to accumulate a few more years of clinical experience and reading notes, and once I have formed a systematic framework, to organize them into a monograph for publication after the age of fifty.

Treat the years well, and the years will treat you well. As a fleeting passerby in nature, the time we dwell on Earth in the form of “human” can hardly exceed a hundred years. This long life of ours is long, one might say, and short, another might say. I will not do the foolish thing of “living fewer than a hundred years yet cherishing a thousand years of sorrow.”