Learning to Coexist with Illness and Life's Problems

In my hot-blooded youth I held many unrealistic fantasies. I believed that through hard work we could surely conquer disease, and that the social problems plaguing us all would one day vanish completely. Even more absurdly, I harbored lofty ideals, believing that through revolution and struggle we could build a great harmonious world.

My father gave me a name meaning "high ambition," which well expressed my adolescent ideals. Immature as I was, I believed I could, like Sun Yat-sen or George Washington, build an ideal state on earth. Now that I am 45, looking back on that adolescent dream, I find it childish and ridiculous from the bottom of my heart.

Leaving aside whether I could ever become a figure like Sun Yat-sen or Washington, the mere dream of building an ideal state has, from ancient times to today, eluded everyone, including Sun Yat-sen and Washington. The Great Harmony is far out of reach; the multitudes still do not know how many more generations must live and multiply in a society full of headaches before they reach that ideal state.

Perhaps such an ideal state can never be realized and will remain only a castle in the air in the minds of idealists. Sun Yat-sen's dying words were: "The revolution is not yet successful; comrades, still must strive." I suspect these words will still be apt in a thousand, or even ten thousand, years.

I once read an article about the writer Zhang Xianliang. It told of a female journalist who interviewed him and lavishly praised his success. Zhang Xianliang brushed off his so-called achievements; compared with the dreams of his youth, he said, they were not worth mentioning. His youthful dream, he said, had been to become a national leader or someone of that stature, to transform society and build an ideal state. I could not help laughing; at last I had found someone else who, like me, had been mad (and not merely rash) in youth.

The author then turned and mentioned that, after the interview, Zhang Xianliang had asked the female journalist out. Reading this I laughed again: if this is true and not invented by the author, then Mr. Zhang is endearing. He had at last returned from the ideal to the real, stopped fretting about his ideal state, and turned to the worldly realities of food, sex, and human nature.

Mr. Zhang is just an extreme case. I believe everyone harbors an idealized expectation of society and family. But that expectation too will one day have its bubble burst; in the words of an old classmate of mine, this is "de-foaming the ideal." Most people can accept the de-foaming, but a few cannot. After their ideals lose their foam, they fall into deep disappointment, mope, and cannot pull themselves out; eventually they develop psychological problems or outright mental illness.

"Not getting what one wants" is in fact the normal state of life. The ancients said: "Nine or ten out of ten things go against us; of these, we can speak to no more than two or three." Whether on the scale of all society or in the daily lives of each ant-like individual, what truly goes as we wish is pitifully rare. Every day's news is full of war, crime, and disasters; in hospitals, countless people with stubborn psychosomatic illnesses cling to a thread of hope to survive. The peace, health, plenty, and harmony humanity longs for is as illusory as a daydream that can never come true.

If we fix our eyes only on such negatives, our whole heart will be dim. I once vowed to sweep away all injustice and misfortune, to clear away all evil and suffering, and let humanity live in happiness. For this reason, at around twenty I was passionate about social movements, pointing at the land and thundering out bold words, hoping to forge a better world. When that wish failed, I was inspired by the ancient saying, "If not a good minister, then a good doctor," and threw myself into medical research, hoping to rescue the wounded and dying and help people escape the clutches of disease.

In the end I found that neither wish could be fulfilled. Not only could the Great Harmony not be built, but disease was not so easy to defeat. What can be cured are basically self-limiting diseases, which would resolve with or without medicine. Cures of non-self-limiting diseases are the exception; most of the time, in the end we yield to disease rather than disease yielding to us.

Now I finally understand: as living beings, we come into this world and must learn to coexist with disease and problems. Disease, like social and family problems, rarely has a perfect solution; we can only compromise with it, accept its inevitability, and hardly draw a clean line against it.

As members of the living world, adapting to our environment and improving our quality of life amid challenges is our innate responsibility and mission. Even parents cannot provide us with a flawless upbringing and environment. If we do not actively meet environmental challenges, we can only follow the rule of "natural selection, survival of the fittest" and be eliminated by nature.

Fortunately, nature has given every living being an inborn ability to meet environmental challenges — in biology, this is termed irritability (or adaptability), the instinctive capacity to respond to external stimuli. If we make good use of this inborn ability, we can win ourselves a longer survival and better quality of life.

Personally, I believe that stopping unrealistic fantasies, accepting the reality that must be accepted, settling for the next best, and learning to coexist with disease and problems are the keys — the very key — to improving our quality of life. If we keep complaining, regretting, and fantasizing, we will sink into endless internal friction, tormenting ourselves and wasting time. We will also easily be exploited by ill-intentioned people, brainwashed by them, and suffer huge losses.

Human emotions can be stirred up and are "person-to-person" contagious; from ancient times to the present, demagoguery has never ceased. Self-serving politicians, swindlers, and advertisers are basically cut from the same cloth, all exploiting human gullibility for their own gain, indifferent to whether others live or die. Deep study, raising one's wisdom and critical discrimination, is the best way to avoid being manipulated.

We can live happily even in an imperfect world; we can live with high quality even while beset by illness and life's difficulties. We need not pursue perfection or complete health — no one is perfectly healthy. Pursuing perfection and absolute health is like drawing water with a bamboo basket or fishing for the moon in the water. Living with problems and disease is our normal state.

Accepting imperfection, fearing no loss, and facing life and death calmly — this not only brings inner peace but makes our actions more rational. Because when we do so, we are free of anxiety, depression, and panic; we have mended the holes in our hearts and are no longer easily impulsive, so others cannot easily exploit us.

What defeats us includes not only unforeseeable accidents, but also our own fragility and ignorance. The world is unpredictable, but no amount of ill fortune can disturb a heart untouched by external things. When a person is no longer fearful or anxious, he can most rationally use the resources he has to maximize his quality of life. Instead of unrealistic fantasies that everything will go our way, is it not better to do our best and then let nature take its course?