Enjoy Poetry and Wine While in Your Prime

Spring not yet old, the wind is fine and willows lean. Climb the Chaoran Terrace and gaze out: half a moat of spring water, a city full of flowers, misty rain dimming a thousand homes.

After the Cold Food Festival, awake from wine, I heave a sigh. Do not yearn for old times with old friends; rather, kindle new fire and brew new tea. Enjoy poetry and wine while in your prime.

——Su Shi, “On the Chaoran Terrace,” to the tune of Wangjiangnan

On May 15, 2024, an ovarian-cancer patient and her husband drove a recreational vehicle all the way to Beijing to see me. They parked the RV near my home, and our meeting was arranged in their vehicle. The elderly couple had been retired for many years; in recent years they have driven their RV all over the country. They spend more than half the year living on the road, returning home only for the festivals to spend time with their children.

Even if this is not exactly the life I have always dreamed of, it is enough to make me covet it. But I know I probably cannot live such a life, because the life path I have chosen is different from theirs; I may have to work until I die. So I can only envy their life a little and sincerely praise it. Of course, I can also arrange my own life more poetically, rather than parroting others' lives.

I am living very relaxed now too. After my child went to university, we obviously felt much more relaxed, and he did as well. After last year's college entrance exam, after much deliberation he chose a normal university. Influenced by his mother, who is a teacher, he is willing to be a math teacher. He still loves mathematics and hopes in future to support himself by teaching while, in the spirit of “playing with it and grasping it,” pursuing long-term research in mathematics.

We respect whatever he chooses. After the entrance exam he adjusted for a while, and now his mindset is well settled. The math major is hard, but his grades are passable. In his first academic year his living expenses were about 25,000 yuan, which is no pressure for our family. He does some private tutoring in his spare time and earns a little pocket money.

He also has time to play his favorite card game. He actively enters various competitions; his results are neither good nor bad, often making the round of 16 and occasionally the top four. Last winter vacation he and his classmates even used their programming skills to develop a game for their own amusement.

My child seems naturally interested in all kinds of competitions. When small and playing with a yo-yo, he could already find places holding yo-yo contests and enter them. It was the same later with skateboarding and model-building; the projects he has been interested in and absorbed in are too many for me to remember fully. Later, in high school, he signed himself up for an advanced foundational class and entered various subject competitions. From start to finish we did not manage him at all and did not interfere in the least. He enjoys the whole process of competing, and I enjoy watching him grow up happily. He also knows not to join the expensive activities, because the pocket money we give him is not much, and he has never asked for pocket money on his own initiative.

I raise my child as I grow vegetables: without the least wish for intensive cultivation, but with a let-nature-take-its-course attitude and happy to see what comes. So my child is more relaxed than the average; while coping with his studies, he still has enough enthusiasm and energy to develop his hobbies. His grades have stayed at an upper-middle level, and he plays happily too. Apart from about a month or two of conflict with us during adolescent rebellion, we get along easily and pleasantly the rest of the time. He is also very attached to home and runs back at every opportunity.

The benefits of having children early are many, and I now feel them personally. After the mother of my child graduated, we, with nothing at all, had a bare marriage and had a child. We were indeed somewhat worse off than our classmates then, but now we are far more at ease. Our income was low then; on the day my child was born I was still borrowing money from my younger male cousin to pay the hospital fees, which shows how hard up we were. Precisely for this reason, the child grew up accustomed to a frugal life and did not develop the habit of spending freely, so now there is no worry about his wasting money. The habit of frugality is a good one: once a person is used to a low-desire life, satisfied by plain food and drink, he will never live in excessive anxiety.

Since my child went to university, I have lived more and more at ease. Given our family's present state, I could enter retirement or semi-retirement. But retiring at this age is really too early and too boring, so I have chosen to continue on in my own career. I now have more freedom: I need not consider family burdens and can focus on doing what I love.

This is very different from my mindset when I was working. Now I need not force myself to shoulder too much pressure and can think more about my own quality of life. After going through a series of middle-aged issues, my thinking shifted a little and my personality developed again. Now I know it is important to be kind to myself; I no longer, like a maniac, disregard my own feelings to satisfy others and accommodate the outside world. I can still give to others and to the world, but the premise is that I myself remain relaxed and at ease; that way I can be happier and keep it up for longer.

Su Shi, too, after middle age, voiced the feeling of “enjoy poetry and wine while in your prime.” Life is short, everyone's life is brief, and our own life passes in a flash; we should not over-consume our lives in response to the expectations the world has of us, forgetting that there is also a self in this world who needs to be taken good care of. The one who can best care for and accompany us is ourselves.

A person has the obligation and the ability to care for and accompany himself well. It is just that, in the span from birth to middle age, so many expectations were placed on us by the outside world that we did not fully understand our own hearts; so within these expectations we lived, to varying degrees, lives “living for others” or “living off others.” Until one day we feel something is not quite right—like always feeling a grain of sand in the shoe as we walk—and we feel our life seems to be controlled by an invisible force, not at ease.

When that day comes, we will suddenly look back at the road behind us and wonder what exactly is pressing on us. Our mind will develop once more in this process; we will complete our own middle-age transformation and become a more complete and more independent person. Such a person knows how, while being kind to all beings, to love himself well, no longer bound by duty, responsibility, emotion, public opinion, or morality, and to live in accordance with his own true inner feelings.

Life is a naturally occurring accident. As long as we do not intentionally harm others, we have the right to spend our lives as we see fit, without taking orders from others and without conforming to some fixed model or belief.

Every person is naturally complete and can be self-sufficient and fulfilled, without depending on or obeying others. This is a natural law formed over billions of years of evolution of life on Earth; those that could not be self-sufficient were naturally eliminated. The survival ability nature gave us is enough to let us meet all difficulties and live out our lives. What we need most is to develop ourselves fully and achieve self-contentment.

Once a person is self-fulfilled and then connects with the outside world, he can be more at ease, and in that connection he can give others a better emotional experience. We will neither wrong others to accommodate us nor wrong ourselves to accommodate them; our own needs we satisfy ourselves, not forcing anyone else to provide. Such companionship does not tire either us or others, and it can last longer.

The underlying logic of Su Shi's sigh “enjoy poetry and wine while in your prime” is this self-contentment, a feeling only middle-aged people can deeply appreciate. We have already spent the better part of our lives meeting society's and others' various expectations; should we not give back this remaining bit of life to ourselves, and let ourselves live more relaxed, without so much pressure? We can use our remaining strength to help others, but only on the premise that it does not cause us pain.

Such an awakening is like a sudden enlightenment that rescues us from the purgatory of life. The existentialist master Sartre said that hell is other people; to a certain extent he was right. When we are stuck in the pit of living to satisfy others' expectations, other people are indeed hell. But when we climb out of that pit and return our lives to ourselves, the others at our side are no longer hell but the finest gift we have received in life; nothing is more precious than natural companionship.

What counts as natural companionship? I believe it is companionship with a sense of boundaries. Not invading others' boundaries while protecting one's own, and connecting and interacting with people on that premise—this is very good both for ourselves and for others. Everyone has his own boundaries, an objective fact whether we acknowledge it or not.

We cannot allow others to stab us with a knife without the slightest evasion or resistance; that is our boundary. Nor can we allow others to emotionally or morally kidnap and extort us; that too is our boundary. Failing to hold one's own boundary and letting oneself be enslaved, or invading others' boundaries to enslave them, only brings suffering.

Protecting one's boundary is not the same as selfishness. Nature endowed every independent individual with the talent to protect his own boundary so that life could continue. If life on Earth lacked the talent to protect its boundaries, life would have ceased long ago; mutual slaughter and natural disasters would suffice to destroy everything. We formed this talent through countless hardships across the eons of life.

The mother of my child says I have grown a great deal this year and become more unhurried than before. She jokes that if I had had this mindset in high school, I could probably have got into any university in the world I wanted. At our age, we have long since stopped caring about the school's reputation, and even about education itself. My going back to school is out of interest, not anything else. The process of study will also take good care of life and family; I will not go far away, much less wear myself to the bone.

The years are few and people age easily; enjoy poetry and wine while in your prime. Enjoy the rest of your life well, and do not let yourself down.