Everything I Meet Is Good
After pulling the wisdom teeth and enduring a few days of gritted, sore days, the tooth on the right side that I had set aside for over half a year had basically returned to normal and could chew food. It seems that pulling the wisdom teeth really did do more good than harm, sparing me from repeated toothache. Today I went again to my insured hospital to see a dentist — this time a restorative dentist. After looking carefully at my teeth, she smiled and said: “If you can accept that the filling will fall out a few days after it is done, then fill it; if you cannot accept that, just ignore the chipped permanent molar.”
I loved the way this dentist communicated — humorous and just to my taste. I have no intention of touching my teeth again. If it were not for orders from home carrying more weight than military command, I would not have made this hospital trip at all. My full set of teeth, though not as useful as before, has fortunately recovered its basic function. The restorative dentist and I talked for a while; by her account, the chipped tooth, given another year or two of adaptation, will basically stop being sensitive and be about as useful as before. Because what broke was the cusp, which is used frequently, after a simple filling the patched part will fall out after a few meals, so it is better not to fill. If a crown were to be placed, root-canal treatment would be needed; in her view, my teeth are not currently damaged enough to require root canal, so she advised against a major operation.
Coming out of the dentist’s, I cycled all the way home; the toothache matter is, for now, at an end. On the way home my mood was cheerful. Passing a lottery shop, I spent twelve yuan to place three bets on the double-colour ball, at double stakes. Why double stakes? Because a single win could not buy a villa in Beijing, whereas two bets lets me indulge, for two days, in the daydream of buying a suburban villa after winning.
As I grow older year by year, I increasingly love life in the countryside or the suburbs. I hope, within ten years, to move from the city to a village or the far outskirts — either back to my hometown, or finding a cheap farmhouse courtyard in Beijing’s outer suburbs. Settling in the country, growing flowers and vegetables, keeping a cat, working, reading, writing and playing music, living like an immortal for a few years.
My health has a few more problems than before, but these new ones do not trouble me the way diseases once did; I have gradually adapted to living with all sorts of chronic illness. Birth, aging, illness and death are heaven’s arrangement. If there were no aging and illness, how clingingly we would hold to this world, and how cruel death would be. Aging and illness are gifts heaven sends us; they let us, step by step, accept that death is life’s best homecoming, rather than clinging so hard to the mortal world. Years of joy and sorrow — if there were only joy and no sorrow, life would not be whole either.
I think everything I have encountered is good, illness and pain included. Once you have suffered, you can live more contentedly with what is broken. Some wounds, if left untouched, hurt far less. Some difficulties we can overcome; some we cannot. When we cannot, we learn to accept them. In life there are always enough pleasant things to distract us and make us forget the pain.
For instance, a clump of roses by the roadside, or a calico cat wandering among them, is enough to make me happy for a long while. This season the roses bloom densely, like a wall of flowers; beneath the wall, a calico cat of unknown breed strolls about. Ever since I started keeping a cat, I always carry cat food in my pocket; wherever I go, if I see a stray cat I give it some. A stray cat that has eaten will meet my eyes for a long while and edge as close to me as it can; that is its way of showing friendliness.
Roses and cats, like us, are living things; cats even share over 90% of their genes with humans. In the moments when I quietly admire the roses and keep the cat company, I can feel that they too are carrying on some kind of conscious exchange with me. When we withdraw from the human world and enter deeply into the world of living things, resonating with them, those pains and troubles move very, very far away.
I can hardly put this feeling into words. Roses, cats and we humans — these multicellular life forms — all follow nature’s ultimate laws. Roses and cats have no anxiety, no impatience; they follow nature in their birth, aging, illness and death. Only we humans have too many troubles, refusing to submit to the basic laws of biology. A person should spend more time with other living things in nature; in that contact, feel more primal life. The more we feel, the closer we come to the truth of life. Over time, life becomes far more beautiful.
Beauty is hard to define, because its standard is so vague. But from my own life experience I know that one day, when we reach a kind of tacit understanding with life, there will be nothing in our lives that is not beautiful. Because the things defined as ugly will no longer trouble us, and we easily find their beautiful side. What is this tacit understanding? I can hardly express it precisely; I can only say, roughly, that we and life have accepted each other — it has accepted our ordinariness, and we have accepted its shortcomings. Once we have accepted each other, there will be no more resentment. Without resentment, is not everything beautiful?