Life's Most Precious Treasure Is Inner Peace
There are always times or periods when we lose our inner peace. As someone whose inner heart is at peace most of the time, I previously had no deep feel for the state of those who are restless within. Now I have a deep feel, and I earnestly hope everyone can be at peace and at ease.
As time goes on, the things that disturbed my inner peace are being resolved one by one, and those painful memories are fading; my inner heart is slowly returning to a state of peace. In the second half of my life, what I least want is to lose inner peace—but this may be hard, because the second half of life is precisely a process of constantly experiencing loss. Only someone who has once known a peaceful heart, and then experienced great pain, will cherish that peace all the more.
I used to be someone who fell asleep in less than a minute after my head hit the pillow, drifting off before nine each night, with a mind as free of care as a baby. I also ate with great relish, never picky, enjoying whatever was put before me. So much so that my wife often said that if an anorexic patient dined at the same table with me, they would recover without medicine, just from catching my enthusiasm.
Now it is not as easy to fall asleep as before. Lying in bed, I sometimes cannot sleep for a long while, as many past events surge through my mind and grief strikes from time to time. A while ago I even occasionally had nights of total insomnia, and my appetite was not as good as before; at one point I grew thin to the point of exposing my shins. I have finally come to know what the ancients meant by no peace in eating and sleeping, and by haggardness.
The various shocks and traumas of the past year-plus have not yet fully worn off. In life, one always has injuries that need time to soothe. Inner wounds, like physical wounds, do not heal completely all at once. Fortunately, heaven has been kind to me and given me a fairly good ability to repair myself.
The worst moments have finally passed. At one point I doubted whether I could endure it, but in the end, as the poem says, "by the sunken ship a thousand sails pass; in front of the sick tree ten thousand trees are green"—I came through each hurdle one by one. Shock after shock that made life unendurable arrived in succession, and many people's lives vanished before my very eyes; former love turned in an instant to pain. This past year-plus I have experienced nothing but parting and death. Compared with such loss, wealth, social status, personal image, and reputation are truly not worth mentioning.
In my career, I am now moving step by step toward my ideal state. As I read more and more books, one door after another—Chinese medicine, Western medicine, biology, psychiatry—has been opened to me. Though I have not yet entered the inner sanctum, my ability to recognize and solve disease has greatly improved, my research on cancer is deeper than before, and I handle patients more easily than I used to.
But at the same time, my ability to recognize other people's suffering has also increased many times over; I can see through many people's suffering at a glance and connect the various confusions of their lives. I once studied hard to build this ability, but only after truly mastering it did I learn that it is a painful thing.
To live more lightly and happily, a person's empathy should actually be moderately weaker; moderate numbness is no bad thing. Limited by medical technology, many psychosomatic diseases are still unsolvable problems today. When we see others struggling in a sea of suffering and are powerless to help, our own hearts are not at ease. This "seeing" of others' seldom-known suffering often disrupts our own inner peace.
Most disciplines do not have to deal with "suffering," but doctors and religious believers spend their whole lives fighting humanity's "life and death" and "suffering," so they witness far more death and touch far more pain than ordinary people. These sometimes become a spiritual burden that must be cleared away in good time so as not to affect one's own physical and mental health.
I hope to spend the second half of my life living in a world more rational than emotional, which will help me study medicine more deeply. To delve deeply into any question, what one needs most is to cut away as much as possible the weeds of tangled emotion, be unaffected—or less affected—by the outside world, and analyze and seek solutions calmly and rationally.