Health and Happiness Are the Foundation of Everything
Those who never seek a doctor are enviable, whether they are poor or rich. Those who neither seek a doctor nor ever fail to live happily are even more enviable; such people live on earth as if in paradise.
True happiness is simple. After years of practicing medicine, I have gradually come to understand that the person with neither physical nor mental burden is the richest person in the world. The health and happiness they possess are the priceless treasures of the human world.
My greatest hope for my own child is simply that he live healthily and happily. When he chooses a partner in the future, I also hope he finds someone who is easy to make happy. Perhaps because I myself am naturally someone with strong antidepressant resilience, I feel a special closeness to people who can be contentedly happy in any circumstances.
A person's blessings are limited. If one over-enjoys one's blessings, in the end one can hardly avoid sorrow born of extreme joy. So those who spend their first half in drunken dissipation mostly go through hardships in the second. The more external things one pursues, the more inner happiness one loses.
Happiness is based on spirituality, and spirituality is based on leisure. Those who spend their whole lives bustling, chasing fame and gain, mostly live with dizzy heads and lose the spirituality that is hardest to come by. Only when a person has a leisurely mindset and leisurely moments—with the free-and-easy attitude of strolling in the courtyard and watching flowers bloom and fall outside the window—will spirituality visit his life.
Time should not be a burden of life. Some people's lives are simply spent stewing through the years. They use so-called success as a shackle, locking themselves firmly in, and the days grow as bitter as a decocted Chinese medicine, darker and more bitter the longer they simmer. While body and spirit still allow it, choosing a way of life one enjoys is very important.
Many people pin their happiness on some future day, on the day the goal they have designed is realized. In fact, when the day the goal is realized actually arrives, it may not truly be all that happy. Right here and now, if what we do is what we like, that is happiness. Living against one's own heart constantly is the greatest betrayal of one's own life.
Both physical and mental health require personal management. The best way to manage them is not to force body or mind beyond their capacity to do anything. Rest when tired; work and exercise when energetic; do less that goes against one's will; say less that strains one's heart; avoid occasions and people one dislikes. The burdens of body and mind will then naturally fall to a minimum. People's fatigue is mostly self-inflicted.