Eighth Year of Writing on the Official Account: A New Turning Point
Without my noticing, I have been writing on the official account for eight years, having composed more than two thousand original articles in all. Many have already been deleted, and others will be deleted. Because when I began writing, my thinking was immature and my understanding of some questions was not yet deep enough, as my reading and practical experience grew, I came to feel that "what I now know to be right was then wrong," and I always want to clear away outdated articles.From now on, updates to the official account will be greatly reduced, and I will no longer post articles daily there. Already-published articles will also undergo a major reorganization in the near future, and many will be deleted in that process. Later, I will carefully revise the articles I am satisfied with and publish them on my personal website.By the way, I plan to activate a new domain name, www.zhiyuanzhai.com (Zhiyuanzhai), for my new website, which will be my main blog going forward. Old friends who wish to keep reading my articles, please remember this URL; all of my future articles will be published on this site.There are several reasons I am doing this.First, and most importantly, I am now 44 years old and keenly feel that the time and energy available to me in the remainder of my life are limited. I should concentrate on doing my professional research well. Over eight years of writing the official account, much of what I wrote was produced in response to readers' requests, which consumed a great deal of my energy.Life is short. To do one thing well, one must be single-minded and concentrate. Over the past years, my attention has been so scattered that many of my study and research plans were not completed, and their pace did not meet my expectations.So now I will gather my energies and study and research according to my own plan. I love medicine and biology and very much want to systematically master both Chinese and Western medicine and biology, and then do some research on that basis. Regrettably, I still have not fully studied the acupuncture-tuina specialty of Chinese medicine, the clinical medicine of Western medicine, or the foundational knowledge of biology. To learn all of these thoroughly would require at least another ten years of deep study.I have never been very fond of socializing; over the years I have attended only one classmate reunion, with just seven closest childhood friends. Several years ago I closed my Weibo and Toutiao self-media accounts. I began using WeChat only a few years after it appeared, and did not open the official account until 2015. I do not like bustle; when an account attracts too many readers, I want to abandon it, because being followed too much is a burden.I originally intended to close the official account this time as well, but on reflection, many friends came to know me through it, and many have read my articles for years. Closing it completely would make these friends feel lost. So, as a second-best choice, I will keep this account but reduce updates going forward.Before the pandemic, I once visited Li Shizhen's hometown, a village only a few dozen kilometers from my own ancestral home. Li Shizhen's village borders a natural lake called Yu Lake; this is why he styled himself "the Old Man by the Bank of Yu" and named his pulse study Bingshu Maixue (Pulse Studies by the Bank of Yu).As I walked by Yu Lake, I was deeply moved and even wept silently by myself. I imagined Li Shizhen, more than five hundred years ago, living in this quiet lakeside village, often walking and thinking by the vast misty lake, then returning home to quietly complete his great work Bencao Gangmu (Compendium of Materia Medica).In the decades after he turned forty, he lived just such a solitary life. But it was precisely this solitude that allowed him to complete Bencao Gangmu, a monumental work that the sinologist Dr. Joseph Needham described as "the greatest scientific achievement of the Ming dynasty."Li Shizhen began compiling Bencao Gangmu after the age of forty; before forty he had also traveled widely and striven for fame and gain. But after forty, Li Shizhen saw through all of that, returned to the shore of Yu Lake, ignored the rights and wrongs of the outside world, and devoted himself wholeheartedly to writing Bencao Gangmu. Indeed, for a person with spiritual aspirations, it is enough in life not to starve; the ideal in one's heart matters more.Beijing is a place where "ten thousand people abound, yet one can hide oneself away." This city of hidden dragons and crouching tigers is ideal for seclusion. I like shutting myself inside this city to immerse myself in reading literature and doing my own research, oblivious to the affairs of the world. I, too, want to devote all the years of my later life, as Li Shizhen did, to polishing a medical work. I know I do not have his talent and can hardly write a monumental work like Bencao Gangmu, but I do not want to waste my time or let the years slip by in vain.This year my son has become an adult. Happily, the boy has done us proud; his academic record is good. Now that the college entrance examination is approaching, his overall state is excellent—outstanding in both grades and psychological composure. Judging by the current trend, he has a good chance of being admitted to the school of his choice.My son loves mathematics and very much wants to spend his life studying mathematics and become a mathematician. As his father, I am of course delighted by such an ambition; his life will no longer require me to worry too much. I can devote more energy to studying medicine and biology in depth.This is also an important reason I want to further reduce my use of social software. In the past I had the need to support my family; that need is gradually becoming less important now. My boy has grown up; later I will let him learn to support himself. I should make a major adjustment to my life and work, gathering my fragmented time into large blocks so that my own dreams can also come true.Going forward, I want to gradually systematize the scattered research of these years and make my research work more detailed and deeper. I used to think I could completely do this while writing the official account on the side. After eight years of practice, I have found that it is impossible.Daily updates to the official account inevitably bring a great deal of extra work that scatters my energy; countless chats and consultations shatter my attention. Over the past few years I have tried devoting myself to researching and writing on a single topic for a period, only to find that such plans were completely unworkable. Because the traffic to my articles was too high, administrative work piled up, forcing my research to be interrupted again and again.Having not used Weibo and other social tools for years, I have now moved one step further away from the internet. I have already gone for a long stretch barely watching the news, and now I no longer have the desire to update the official account daily. Although I will write every day for the rest of my life, I may not publish much on social media going forward. Toward the outside world, I maintain an attitude of slowly and gradually withdrawing. For research and professional writing, it is better to retreat into the study and keep things quiet.In addition, after many of the articles I wrote over these years were published, they were plagiarized unscrupulously by many people, which also left me somewhat disillusioned with internet writing. So I intend that many of my professional research articles will no longer be first published on the internet.I will try to keep this official account alive to meet the psychological needs of some old friends. I believe that readers who truly connect with me at heart will not care whether I write on the official account in the future or on my personal website. To avoid instability of website servers, I will publish my articles simultaneously on two sites: www.zhouzhiyuan.com and www.zhiyuanzhai.com.Old friends need only remember these two URLs to never lose me in the vast crowd. Strangers who glance by never paused for us in the first place, so why should we be sentimental and reluctant to part?In closing, I wish you all good health, a happy life, and everything going your way.