Honing Patience, Building Capability
When I woke up this morning, I rode my bicycle to the small vegetable garden at the foot of Fragrant Hills and pulled weeds by hand. On top of the pile I pulled out the day before yesterday, today I removed nearly two more baskets of weeds. The little garden finally looks like a garden rather than a wasteland, and it looks much more endearing than a few days ago.
After weeding, I rode home in a hurry, quickly changed my clothes, tossed the dirty ones into the washing machine, and rushed to the National Library to grab a seat. The reading room opens promptly at nine every day; I ran as fast as I could and arrived at 8:59.
In summer, a seat at the National Library is hard to come by. Top students from several nearby high schools—led by the High School Affiliated to Renmin University—all come here to fight for seats, along with adults preparing for the postgraduate entrance exam, civil service exam, and public institution recruitment. Arriving late means there is simply no seat to be had.
This summer, I have begun a long-gestating writing project: I want to systematically write my own medical philosophy into a thin book. At the same time, the personal website I have maintained for 11 years has reached a critical juncture. From its original obscurity, it has grown into a site visited by 20,000 to 30,000 people daily, with traffic surpassing the official websites of many medical journals. The virtual host I originally rented on Alibaba Cloud is overburdened, and Alibaba Cloud keeps urging me to upgrade as soon as possible. A major technical overhaul is now needed to prepare it for further growth in the coming years.
I decided to grit my teeth and spend some time learning new IT technology and the latest AI tools, keeping pace with the times and completing the site's technical upgrade. I have not learned new IT skills for years; it is time to recharge myself.
Over the past academic year, besides studying Western medicine, I have also been diligently studying medical English. I want to remove the barriers to reading English medical literature, and I also want to build a medical multilingual website centered on English, combining my various technical strengths to further expand my career. In three to five years, results should be visible. Although AI can now help with translation and site building, learning more oneself is still the better path.
The Analects says, "The junzi (noble person) is not a mere vessel." This means a junzi should not be like a utensil with only a single function, but should possess diverse abilities. In today's fast-changing technological society, this idea of Confucius deserves even greater emphasis. Confucius's educational thinking was remarkably advanced; modern higher education philosophy, by comparison, looks rather clumsy. Our majors are divided too finely; it appears we have trained many specialists, but people's vision has narrowed. Once society undergoes major change, many people will become victims of specialized education, eliminated amid social progress, which objectively drives up population anxiety.
My mentor, when I was sixteen or seventeen, constantly emphasized to me that education and study should not be overly utilitarian. He hoped I would read widely, integrate Chinese and Western learning, accumulate deeply before releasing, and not seek quick success. At my present age, recalling the teachings I received under him, I remain deeply grateful. I am not his outstanding disciple, but he was truly a great teacher; to have been educated by him at a critical stage of my life has benefited me endlessly.
Society, the nation, and the individual all inevitably rise and fall. As the old saying goes, one lives through three spells of poverty and three of wealth; everyone encounters adversity in life. But with good psychological adjustment and without being so impatient for quick gain, even when facing headwinds one will not be trapped in anxiety and depression.
Humans may have lived on this planet for millions of years. Objectively speaking, today's living conditions are the best in history. In the past, war, plague, famine, and natural disasters routinely caused far more casualties than today, and our ancestors found survival far harder than we do. Yet we have reproduced generation after generation and survived. In the final analysis, the most important reason we have survived is that the human gene carries within it a spirit of unremitting self-improvement.
I dislike those articles and videos that peddle anxiety. In my view, they are either the ravings of the mentally unwell or the profit-making schemes of people with ulterior motives. I not only avoid them myself, but when my wife stumbles upon them, I ask her to turn them off. Apart from death, there is no obstacle a person cannot get through; rather than wasting time listening to such nonsense, one would do better to invest that energy in self-improvement. Settle down to study and move forward, and a person will not be so easily eliminated by society.
With social development, academic credentials are indeed depreciating, but human patience and capability never depreciate in any society. I think academic credentials ought to depreciate; a few hundred years ago, there was no such thing as a credential in the world. Why does everyone now rush headlong to chase them? In society, are not ability and endurance more important? The fad of chasing credentials at the expense of the root should blow itself out; if it blows on forever, it is unreasonable. Do not sacrifice the root for the branch, and do not let utilitarianism blind your heart; there are still many interesting things waiting for us to explore.