From More to Less, from Big to Small
These past two days I have shrunk my "balcony vegetable garden" by about half. I threw away the old foam boxes and added their soil to the planting pots. After tidying up, I sowed some spinach seeds in the pots—at this season, besides spinach, there is little else worth planting.
I have kept my balcony garden for nearly a year. It has brought me some joy and some lessons. Some online balcony gardens are truly magnificent, but I cannot reproduce those results in real life. My tomatoes and eggplants yielded almost nothing. My cabbage and radishes were eaten by insects before they matured. My baby cabbage and lettuce tasted somewhat bitter. Only water spinach, spinach, Chinese chives, and crown daisy gave decent harvests. Next year I plan to grow just a few pots of these few vegetables, as a pastime after work.
That means I no longer need so many pots. Balcony gardening is water-intensive; growing fewer also conserves water. A year ago I had an actual vegetable plot. Even earlier this year I still had nearly ten square meters of balcony garden. By this autumn, only these last few square meters remain. Together with a few indoor pots, it is now barely more than a token gesture.
These three years, because of the pandemic, my business has also shrunk considerably. That has freed up time to review my studies, preparing to retake the college entrance exam and spend a few more years at medical school. But the pandemic kept flaring up, and my son's school enforced strict rules: if anyone in the household returned to Beijing from elsewhere within seven days, the student could not return to class. My son is about to take the college entrance exam himself. So for his sake I postponed my own plans, unwilling to travel repeatedly between my hometown and Beijing for registration and formalities and disturb his studies.
Expenditures have also shrunk further. Aside from books, food, and daily necessities like toothpaste and toothbrushes, I have almost stopped shopping. Occasionally I still donate to major disasters and to people in special hardship, but the sums are smaller than before. With income down, I can no longer be as generous as I once was.
The number of friends on social media has also dwindled. Those long out of touch, those with whom I have nothing in common, those with extreme temperaments—where I have noticed them, I have deleted or blocked them from my Moments; those I have not noticed, let them be. With patients, too, I take a go-with-the-flow attitude: I do not treat the doubtful, and neither side forces the other. Living this way is not tiring.
If I give up expecting a better life, then my present life is the best; if I give up expecting more harvest, then even a small gain can bring joy; if I give up expecting splendor, then these quiet years feel doubly warm.
I look forward to next spring, when these twenty-odd pots of spinach will bring me small pleasures. I also enjoy autumn afternoons, sitting in a sunlit room, reading and working through problems. The gardenia I planted grows ever more lush, which now and then delights me. Riding with my wife to the country park to see the rice fields also brings me pleasure.
Living ever more simply, moving from more to less and from big to small, I have grown much lighter. At my age, I no longer need to adorn myself to attract a mate, nor to pretend to make a living; I can live as I truly am—doing what I like, saying what I think.
People like me have little "emotional intelligence." My sister-in-law says my brother has IQ but no EQ; the same applies to both of us. I comfort him: we are people who do not need EQ to live, so why dress ourselves up? We craftsmen who live by our skills need only learn our craft well, keep refining it, and we will not starve. Time flows on like this; each day I cherish it, study hard, and improve myself. As for how much I ultimately harvest or achieve—that is up to fate.