Live the Life You Want Right Now

“Counting sand grains in the sea, only to weary oneself in vain; / How often, before the wind and moon, does one knit one’s brow? / If you can rest now, then rest now— / There is no end to the seeking of an end.”

— The Song-dynasty monk Shi Shifan, Finishing the Sutra Facing the Moon

My vegetable garden has grown more and more neglected, because my time is no longer as abundant as during the pandemic, but I still keep it up. This is my fifth year of gardening in Beijing, and the plot is half the size it used to be. After four years I realized renting a 40-square-meter garden was pure waste—I simply did not have the time or energy to tend it, and could not even eat all the vegetables I grew.

Most of my fellow gardeners are retirees with more free time, so they keep their plots beautifully. I can only go two or three times a week, staying about an hour each time to water and weed, get a taste of pastoral life, and head home. I ride a shared bike both ways, and the mood each time is quite good.

As someone born and raised in the countryside, I have an unbreakable attachment to pastoral life. I once hoped to return to my hometown early for a life of farming and reading. Since I got this small garden, my homesickness seems cured; I no longer long so strongly to go back, and this life already satisfies me. In Beijing, two thousand yuan a year in rent is not high; the vegetables are roughly worth that much, and the joy of gardening is beyond money.

An elderly neighbor asked me: “You’re so busy—why keep gardening?” I told her that busyness is my lifelong norm; I will probably never retire and may work until I die, but I cannot let that mean I have no hobbies or life of my own. The teachers I studied under and the senior doctors I know are mostly still working, the oldest nearly a hundred. Watching them, I know what my own future will look like.

So I make no retirement plans. For people like us, retirement is a luxury and a waste of life. The public will not let us retire; someone will always come knocking. Whatever life one wants to live, one must set aside time for it now and live it well; only then will there be no regret at the end.

I teach my son and my students the same: I hope they keep a calm, relaxed state throughout life—studying, working, and living at an even, unhurried pace, persevering, and being easygoing long-termists. Arrange time reasonably, live a richly varied life, and don’t fixate on one thing. However much we love any single pursuit, without other pleasures as relief we grow weary; once bored, work, study, and life all turn dull, and our world shifts from sunshine to gloom.

Our cat of a year has grown fonder of us; lively and endearing, it occasionally comes to play and brings us much joy. Only the houseplants have suffered—since getting the cat, they won’t thrive. But because I spend so much time in the garden close to nature, the loss of the plants feels trivial.

This green belt at the foot of the Western Hills has become my new spiritual home: the vegetable and fruit gardens of Siqing Township, the rice paddies of Beiwu, Zhongwu, and Yudong Parks, the rapeseed fields of Tiancun, the moonlit nights, Long River, and ancient pagoda at Yuquan Hill, the sunrise and sunset over the Western Hills, the ancient pines and red leaves of Fragrant Hills, the clear rivers and lakes everywhere—all so beautiful and perfectly suited to my temperament. These places are close to my home, about half an hour by bike; I often ride there to feel nature’s beauty and relax. Back home, I am full of enthusiasm again for reading, working, and writing.

I also visit the library often and still tinker with my instruments now and then; the cat has become my most faithful listener. Whenever I strike the singing bowl or the kongling drum, or pluck the strings with clumsy fingers, it pricks up its head like a little fan, listening curiously—the cute expression is irresistible. The small Buddha statues and animal ornaments on my bookshelf have become the cat’s playmates. Where I once sat silently before the Buddha alone, now I converse with the Buddha alongside this faithful cat; surely the Buddha finds it more interesting than before.

My needs are few, and all are met, so my felt experience of life is good. Both my parents demand very little from life. Though I now send my father a monthly allowance, he spends essentially nothing and saves it all; by growing some vegetables himself plus the government subsidy for farmers over 60, he has solved his own survival. The furniture in my old home is still the set from my childhood; my father has carried frugality to the extreme.

He also has his own joys in old age: he is in our village band, and whenever a family holds a wedding or funeral, they call him to play, earning a hundred yuan per gig—an extra few hundred to over a thousand a year. Renting out the family land brings another one or two thousand, enough for his gifts to relatives and occasional treats.

Influenced by my parents, I have lived a low-desire life throughout: however high or low my income, my standard is minimal—just a few hundred yuan a month suffices. My son inherited this too; he never pursues luxury or competes with classmates, so my family puts little pressure on me.

Raised with loose rein, my son grew up freely, with broad hobbies and the knack of enjoying himself. Each age has had its favorite pursuit; from childhood up he has been hooked on a dozen or so sports and pastimes. Lately he enjoys a card game and regularly enters competitions around Beijing; by his account he has made the city’s top four almost every time in the last two years. He plays happily, and I am happy for him; I don’t want my son to study himself into a bookworm.

As a hands-off father, I feel no anxiety about his future and don’t weigh his academics heavily. He is an adult now, fully free to arrange his own life; I won’t hover or obstruct his exploration. I hope whatever career he chooses he lives relaxedly. What I repeatedly stress is: just persevere; a slower pace is fine; no need to keep the strings of study, work, and life pulled so tight. “A long forced march exhausts the commander”—eager, narrow chasing of quick success easily breaks people.

I even urge him not to take life’s ideals too seriously. If he has lasting interest in mathematics, let him devote his life to it with a “playfully exploring” mind, doing his research joyfully as a pleasure rather than a task, not fretting over success or failure. We never need others to confirm our worth; we assign value to our own lives. If one day he finds a calling more suited to his nature than math, turning elsewhere is fine. Life is just a process; enjoy the process and don’t care too much about outcomes.

Live naturally and there is not much vexation or tension. Survival is actually very easy; the earth simply cannot satisfy our endlessly inflated desires, not because it cannot feed us. Human society has grown ever more complex over its recorded history, until we humans on this planet have gradually forgotten that we too are part of the living world, come only to pass through birth to death. We have bound ourselves tight with all manner of grand, self-deceiving vanities, and many live exhausted as a result.

A clear-sighted person should realize that the simpler life is, the happier; the more primitive, the more relaxed; the closer to nature, the more we grasp life’s true meaning. Let go of ego-attachment, return to nature, all things are at peace—what is there to grieve?