Live a Minimalist Life, Enjoy Easily Gained Happiness

Günter Grass wrote a novel called The Tin Drum, whose protagonist Oskar keeps refusing to grow up. Strictly speaking, every one of us is a bit like Oskar deep down; many people live in childhood all their lives.

This can be explained by biology: certain environmental influences in early life can bring about epigenetic changes. In early life, genotype and environment act together, and certain traits produced then affect a person's whole life. For example, a person's consumption values, eating habits, exercise habits and reading habits are all deeply influenced by childhood life. The roots of some diseases can also be traced to childhood habits; for instance, cancers such as gastric cancer and nasopharyngeal carcinoma are related to eating too many pickled foods in childhood.

Oskar in Günter Grass's writings hopes, by refusing to grow, to reveal the absurdity of the real world; in a child's eyes, the adult world is indeed utterly bewildering and full of absurdities. When I was in fourth grade of primary school, my older brother was in first grade of junior high. My father attached great importance to our education; my brother and I should have studied at the village middle school in our village, but my father insisted on sending us to the town-center middle school in another town, which had a better academic atmosphere. My brother had to board there; he was very attached to home, and when he first went he always cried and refused to go, but he could not prevail over our parents.

My brother came home every weekend; on Sunday afternoons he shouldered a rice sack and hiked more than ten li over the mountains from home to school. Each time I walked across the mountain ridge with him; we would part on the ridge, he continuing to school and I returning home. Before parting, my brother always sat with me on the ridge for a while. Once, sitting on the ridge, he said to me: "Are all the rules in this world right? On what grounds must we obey other people's arrangements?"

My brother's question was one that Oskar, who forever refused to grow up, also asked. I am now in my forties, and I still remember vividly the question my brother asked back then; at different stages of my life I occasionally ask it of myself. My brother was both bright and a bit rebellious in junior high; in his third year he even disappeared for more than three months, and neither home nor school could find him. But when he returned to take the high school entrance exam, he still came in first.

Later, when I went to junior high, I too tasted the pain of separation my brother felt when he first left home for boarding school, but I was not as rebellious as he; only on my first day, after evening self-study, did I hike across the mountains in the middle of the night, through quite a few graveyards, and run back home, giving my parents a fright. The next morning my father took me back to school. The two of us brothers were both so attached to home.

Even now, I seem not to have fully walked out of childhood; I am still attached to home, still asking the question my brother asked in first grade of junior high. We brothers shared one room and one bed since childhood; our bond is deep and our characters similar. Our path of growth was a bit different from most people's; even now I still suspect that I have not grown up.

My eating habits and interests seem never to have changed throughout my life. In childhood, our family was poor and we could only afford simple fare; after I started working, my income was decent, but my eating habits have not changed in the slightest. Even now I still eat mainly a light diet.

The two hobbies of reading and writing have also been with me since primary school and continue to this day; I expect they will remain so all my life. Over all these years, there has hardly been a day when I have not repeated this simple life from childhood. I am very nostalgic; being able to live one kind of life from youth to old age, and to let the years pass without storm or stress, is something many people cannot do. Most people are unwilling to live an unchanging life, but I do not find it boring; on the contrary, I enjoy the tranquility it brings.

In Jin Yong's The Legend of the Condor Heroes there is a character named Bao Xiruo, Yang Kang's mother. After she married Wanyan Honglie and became a princess, she moved her rural home into the princely mansion and lived out her life in a small room there. There really are such people in the world: no matter where they live in life, what they miss most is their childhood home, and they live as they did in the past. I now live in Beijing, but I feel nothing for the city's bustle; I am merely trying to live a country person's life within this city.

I have always felt the countryside is better, that country life is far more comfortable than city life. The imprint childhood left on my mind is so deep that I have no intention of changing even now. Of course, not everyone who grows up in the country is like this; many country people prefer the rich variety of city life. It is simply that my own nature prefers the simple, plain country life.

Throughout my life I have been extremely easy to satisfy. As a child I was always bouncing around; I loved to sing opera and warbled away at home every day, inexplicably happy. My father was prone to anxiety; he always chided me for not knowing how to worry, and sometimes, seeing me too cheerful, he would order me to settle down. The sentence I remember my father asking me most in childhood was: "Zhiyuan, how is it that you don't know how to worry at all?" And a phrase my mother often said when she was alive was: "This youngest son of mine, once he has eaten one meal, doesn't worry whether there's another."

In recent years a term has become popular in psychology called "delayed gratification." Because many anxiety and depression patients are rather impatient, this term appears frequently in psychological counseling and fashionable reading circles. But I think the view that "delayed gratification" is a rare quality is pure nonsense; the term itself reflects Western psychology's helplessness in the face of mental illness.

In fact, our traditional Chinese culture long ago contained the cultural elements to cure such psychological illnesses—the idiom every Chinese person can recite: contentment always brings happiness. Some people raised in Chinese culture are innately easy to satisfy; they have no need for delayed gratification. Everything in the present—white clouds drifting in a blue sky, the rustle of wind through trees, a wild flower by the roadside, a butterfly among blossoms—can make them deeply content. How could such easily satisfied people become anxious or depressed?

Happiness is reliable only when it is as plain as can be. A simple home-cooked meal can delight; blue skies and white clouds can delight; the joys of family can delight; a clear breeze and bright moon can delight. Only in this way can we feel ourselves happy at every moment. Must a person necessarily set a goal and pursue the "delayed gratification" that comes after achieving some great enterprise? Of course not! In my view, pursuing delayed gratification is obsessive-compulsive behavior. Chan Buddhism says "every day is a good day, every hour a good hour"; that is the highest state. If a person can attain this happiness of being joyful at any moment, it is truly the greatest blessing of life.

I am very grateful to my mother, because this innately easy-to-satisfy nature of mine is inherited from her; it is the best gift my mother gave me. Only after dealing with many depression and anxiety patients did I realize that this nature is a treasure that all the wealth in the world cannot buy. It makes me, even with nothing at all, still complete and self-sufficient. People endowed with this nature have been blessed by heaven from the womb.

I am now forty-three, moving from "no perplexities" toward "knowing the will of heaven." Still, from time to time, like Oskar who refuses to grow up, and like my brother in first grade of junior high, I question whether the ideas everyone considers reasonable in this world are truly right and reasonable, refusing to be captured by them lightly.

My mentor says my growth has been a freewheeling journey, refusing the slightest compromise with reality and the mundane. Perhaps it is precisely for this reason that I can still take delight in a minimalist life, enjoying all kinds of easily gained blessings my whole life. I think this is fine; my life can only be defined by myself, and I need no one to teach me how to live. Only then is life light and free!