My son has long planned to study abroad; even before the college entrance exam, my wife and I had considered letting him go abroad for his undergraduate or graduate studies. After the exam, his mother and my elder brother actively urged him to study English and take the TOEFL or IELTS. The child, exhausted after three years of grind for the exam, badly wanted a good rest; his motivation to study English was low, and he preferred to unwind and play games.But at times he felt guilty, as if playing games meant he was going to waste; once he even told me he felt he had degenerated. I comforted him, telling him not to think that way. If he wanted to rest for a while, then rest; play to his heart's content, and then study.My elder brother is an English major, and these days he has eagerly volunteered to tutor his nephew in English. I told him that the child was still deflated after the exam and had not yet digested his negative emotions, so there was no need to rush him into English. I also asked my brother whether he remembered how I spent every summer vacation in high school—never a summer did I not fish so obsessively that I forgot to eat and sleep. I spent whole days by the river fishing, refusing even to come home for meals. My mother had no choice but to bring my food out to where I fished, for fear I would go hungry. I asked my brother: did my excessive play then harm my career today?The answer, of course, was no. I am especially grateful to my parents; they never forced me to be a bookworm of a good child. I was such a mischievous, playful boy, and they did not—as parents do today—force me to study. They always took a natural, laissez-faire attitude and let me play to my heart's content.Besides fishing, when I was young I loved chess, cards, writing, reading, swimming, table tennis, hiking, and wuxia novels. I even loved opera back then, but with no teacher; I imitated the actors myself and, now and then, bawled out a few off-key lines. My winter and summer homework was always delayed again and again, crammed only in the week or two before school started, and sometimes not even finished then.Today I still love life. Besides studying medicine, I have many hobbies: growing vegetables, planting flowers, playing music, keeping cats, cycling, swimming. Now in my forties, I am still full of energy and fight, and read every day. This year I even, on a whim, began reviewing at home to take the college entrance exam once more and go back to university for a few years.The reason I have never grown weary of life or study has much to do with my mother's tolerance and affection. My mother, an illiterate woman who could not read a single character, understood education better than many intellectuals today. When I went out to play, she did not frown on it, did not constantly nitpick, did not force me to study, did not nag. I was a keen fisherman but a poor one; each trip I caught fewer fish than others, and they were small. Each evening I would trudge home with a meager catch, and my mother would smile and tell the neighbors, "My son has again brought home a few fish with eyes on their tails" (a way of saying the fish were tiny) "—with a big basin of chilies, that makes a fine dish of river fresh."Parents today can hardly tolerate their children playing all vacation without studying. I feel for children now. By biological nature, children and young people are meant to play. Only when they have played enough and played happily can they keep abundant vitality and passion. But today's children are forced to study, do homework, and attend tutoring the moment a holiday begins, as if anything less were a cardinal sin; parents nag on incessantly, and parent-child relations grow tense. My mother never attended a single parent-child workshop, yet she managed our relationship beautifully. In fact parents need do little; natural tolerance and love for their children are enough to make children love their parents.I have a good memory and recall most of my childhood clearly. I am always willing to put myself in my child's place and think for him; I often ask what I was doing and experiencing at his age, and once I think of it, I feel I should not be hard on him. Parents today love demanding that children live up to adult standards, so children carry heavy burdens and live wearily.My son is very much like me. His interests are broad: he has learned instruments, built models, skateboarded and rollerbladed, and is mad about games; the yo-yos he broke as a child were beyond count. He even took apart our mechanical watches and kitchen-timer tomatoes to study their structure, loves comics, and once tried to draw his own comics—without a teacher, teaching himself from a book, much as I learned Huangmei opera back then by bawling it out on my own.He has never studied wholeheartedly, and I have always, as my mother tolerated me, tolerated everything about my son. I do not think a child's playfulness is some great crime. On the contrary, what is truly worrying is when a person falls into the modern way of life and forgets his own biological nature; for over time such a person becomes depressed and loses his passion for life.Though a child raised as my son has been will surely lose out in the exam-oriented system, I think the loss is worth it. The reason I have kept a lifelong habit of learning has much to do with having played enough as a child. Only when a person feels life is interesting and beautiful does he have the drive and will to live this life and strive for a career.Lifelong learning far outlasts a decade of grinding for a degree. Many people grow more and more tired of learning while pursuing a degree and never open a book again once they have it. For a while I worked at a hospital; several of our senior doctors, moved by how much I loved reading, went home and took out their yellowed medical books to read—after passing their various certificates, they had never wanted to look at a book again. How were they to keep growing?The best university is actually one's own study. School lasts only a dozen-odd years, but the study at home accompanies us a lifetime. If a person stops loving books once he has his degree, he not only learns nothing new but quickly forgets what he once knew; his professional level can hardly improve, and in the end he is reduced to a mere wage-earner, always at risk of being swept onto the beach by the tide of the times. So I believe the best study habit is not the "top-student" style promoted by today's exam-oriented education, but learning while playing—playing happily, studying solidly.There was a time when my grades were not the very top; looking back, it was not because I was dull, but because I spent so much time playing, while many of my classmates studied fiercely then. With respect, among my classmates today, I fear few read as widely or know as broadly as I do. After graduation they grew busy and had little time to learn, while I have kept the habit of playing-and-learning to this day. In absolute hours of study, I far exceed them. God is fair: the more study time you put in, the more you learn; lifelong learners have the advantage later on.I often tell my son: a person's life is long, and there is plenty of time to learn. As long as you truly love a discipline, you can spend your whole life studying it with the attitude of "playing with it and gaining insight." Do not be impatient for results; impatience easily bruises your enthusiasm for life, study, and work, and once that enthusiasm is bruised it is hard to restore. If you want to play, play to the full; once you have played enough, you will naturally settle down to learn, for playing constantly grows boring even to yourself.I see that people in most countries and regions today are very impatient. In an environment of over-competition, education and research have become obsessed with quick results, and as a result produce little. If we want to do research, once we choose a direction we need not set goals, plans, and timetables; we can, according to our own health and mood, work at an unhurried pace for a lifetime, pursuing scholarship while living a rich life. The achievements of the great mathematician Chen Jingrun are admirable, but he overworked himself to produce results quickly, and his life was not long; that too was unwise. Those who move at a steady pace and persevere over the long haul more often become truly accomplished, and are healthier in body and mind.I have met many people with stories like mine, who wanted to study medicine to save themselves and others, but almost all of those I have met gave up halfway on the road. Because they were impatient for results, they abandoned the goal after failing in three to five years, which is a great pity. I saw Professor Shing-Tung Yau speak about mathematical research and raise the same point: many people study mathematics, and when they do not succeed in three to five years they are unwilling to spend more time and energy on it and give up, whereas he persisted far longer than others.Some of the great discoveries and achievements of human society were produced by scholars who devoted their entire lives to them; only a very few geniuses succeed young. The overwhelming majority of scholars are late bloomers. Before they became famous, those scholars were ordinary too.For example, Chen Jingrun was not a graduate of a top school like Tsinghua or Peking University; he graduated from the mathematics department of Xiamen University, and after graduation went to Beijing No. 4 High School, teaching while continuing to study mathematics. Terence Tao, the Chinese-Australian Fields Medalist (the "Nobel Prize of mathematics"), did his bachelor's and master's at Flinders University in Australia, which is no famous school; in Australia his school does not even rank among the so-called Group of Eight. It is just such unassuming people who, through patient research and day-by-day accumulation, made great achievements.Besides not being impatient for results, I am personally especially fond of a line by the poet Du Fu: "You and your kind shall perish, body and name alike, while the great rivers flow on, unending." I often recite this line to remind myself that body and name are not so important; even if one makes great discoveries and achievements, before nature they amount to little. Humanity itself will not endure; all its achievements are but passing clouds to the universe. Why take them, or ourselves, so seriously? With this mindset, whatever one does, one will not be overly attached.