Maturity, Aging, and Death

After the Mid-Autumn Festival, the rice in the western suburbs gradually turned golden. Walking along the field ridges, breathing the familiar scent of straw, and in the evening watching the distant scattered lights and the starry sky by the paddy fields, I felt I was not in bustling Beijing but had returned to my hometown deep in the Dabie Mountains.

I love this season of maturity, love this gold spread over all the hillsides, love cycling with my wife in this wild countryside—the wilderness is the most beautiful scenery in the eyes of those who love nature and life. In this country park, I can not only see familiar rice paddies but also hear the long-unfamiliar croaking of frogs.

Here my heart is both calm and joyful, because my life has merged into this green woodland, singing with the nightingales here and dancing with the fireflies. My clumsy writing is insufficient to describe this incomparably beautiful feeling. I know that one day aging, illness, and death will also destroy my body, so in the years when I can enjoy life, I always find ways to take time to enjoy everything here to the full.

For us living beings, the most important things are air, greenery, blue sky, white clouds, water, and food. Except that food requires us to work for it, the rest are gifts generously given by nature. But many people do not realize these are what matter most; they go chasing other things. Catching up may bring joy, or may not; failing to catch up brings anxiety and sorrow. They forget these most precious yet easily obtained things around them, so they are always gloomy. Walk more in the countryside, get closer to nature, return to the essential state of life, and your mood will be quite different.

Thanks to long professional training and self-adjustment, I have gradually entered a state of seeking truth, calm, and neutrality, which means my mind has also matured like the autumn rice fields. I have gradually returned to a state of biological instinct—other creatures are not as greedy and troubled as we humans are. Under the control of our limbic system, we humans ceaselessly chase far too many things we will never use in a lifetime, exhausting our spirit and strength without even realizing it.

You and your name will both perish, yet the great rivers flow on forever. All living and non-living things in nature do not care about our success or failure, nor about our joys and sorrows. When we converse with a calm mind with plants, mountains, clouds, and birds, those troubling human affairs instantly become trivial. In the end only joy and love remain in our hearts—love for life, and love for those we love and who love us.

Grains draw enough nourishment and water from the earth to gradually grow into full kernels; people also need to draw enough love and experience from life to mature. Once mature, our lives will be full of tension. After maturity also means that aging and death will arrive in the near future. Only those who have loved fully in the season of maturity will leave few regrets when aging and death come.

I know that today's me will not last forever, just as this golden paddy will soon become desolate; I too will head toward aging and death in the near future. But I will not feel fear or panic at such an arrangement of fate. Because I have loved—loved this nature, loved countless beautiful people, loved myself, and I have been loved by many people. One who lives as gorgeously as a summer flower can also die as quietly as an autumn leaf.

Death is not something unacceptable, as long as death occurs in a state of inner peace; death can be as beautiful as everything else. We will all die; preparing ourselves psychologically early on means we will not be so panicked when welcoming death. Facing death correctly is one of the important signs of mental maturity. Tao Yuanming's attitude toward death—“Drifting in the great transformation, neither pleased nor afraid; when it is time to end, just end, and worry no more”—is so free and easy that it is worth everyone's learning.

Mature rice droops its head; a mature person also knows to restrain his edge. We finally no longer pursue how dazzling we ourselves look, but have learned to appreciate all the beauty of this world in a quiet corner, forgetting and downplaying the halo over our own heads; we have learned to view everything in the world with neutrality, no longer so eager to argue. It turns out that after quieting down, all this is so beautiful!