Pressing On Under the Guidance of Conscience, Love and Reason
On August 19, after getting up, I went and worked for a while in the vegetable garden at the foot of Fragrant Hills, and that bouts-of-sadness mood did not recur. Before me there was still a heap of things to handle: work, life, family, emotion, the illness of the elderly, the education of the children, and all the tangled grievances among family members; every problem was thorny. Like whirlpools, they formed forces pulling in different directions, and I myself was at the very center of the vortex. All of it waited for me to deal with.
My mother says I am a person who has lived several lives, with a fate so robust I have escaped fatal disasters many times. But she omitted one: a near-drowning in childhood. One noon I drowned in the middle of our village river. I could swim, but as the old saying goes, good swimmers drown; that day I had a cramp in the water. There was no one around, and I had no time to call for help; in my panic I swallowed several mouthfuls. At last I sank to the bottom, where I felt around and found a large stone. I held that stone, using it to steady myself on the riverbed, then chose the direction of one bank and stepped along the bottom, step by step, from the middle of the river to the shore—and so was saved.
The crossroads of life are like a drowning; the forces in the whirlpool try to push us in different directions. At such a moment, how does one decide? I think the only principle to follow is conscience: uphold what is right rather than favoring persons, while balancing the interests of all sides and soothing their feelings. Grasping this direction is very important; I absorbed it by watching my father. When I was a child, many villagers with disputes came to our house to ask my father to judge; he mediated the various relationships by exactly this principle.
In short, we should practice every good and reject every evil. Goodwill can serve as the ultimate magic key to resolving grievances, whereas doing wrong brings only momentary pleasure while leaving behind enormous trouble; it makes grievances roll on endlessly. It is not easy to balance all sorts of relationships; the person at the center of the whirlpool can only press on under the guidance of conscience, love and reason, and must not rely on emotion to solve problems. Emotion does not solve problems; emotion only brings more problems.
The greatest luxury of middle age is illness. Whether physical or mental, illness has enormous impact on oneself and on those around one. As Malinowski said, every person is a cog in society with a unique social function; if one person stops too long through illness, the other cogs that rely on us cannot run properly. So if we can recover quickly, we should recover quickly and not drag our feet; a major duty of the physician is to seek the patient a speedy recovery.
I have long advocated that cancer patients return to life and to society as early as possible, continue playing their roles and realize their value. The same should hold for patients with other diseases. On Zhihu I saw some bipolar patients confess that they were actually refusing recovery, because they did not want to bear the family and social responsibilities they would have to bear—after all, bearing them is hard work.
But I do not like hiding behind the shield of depression for too long. It is true that a depressed person is not easily noticed; but once noticed, the illness should be cured at once. For a well-trained doctor, this kind of explosive depression should respond with immediate effect. I had actually been depressed for more than half a year without knowing it—strictly speaking, depression of less than a year does not count as depression disorder, only as pseudo-depression; true depression is depression that persists for over a year without relief.
Depression is not all the same. Some depression works together with other factors (such as borderline personality disorder) and makes lifelong cure nearly impossible, so that the patient can only adapt his way of living as well as possible and improve his quality of life. For such patients, choosing the right living environment and companions matters far more than personal effort, because they can no longer reach their goals through effort alone.
A normal person cannot be absent from this society for too long; absent too long, our life becomes a mess, and a deteriorated life worsens the illness further, while also causing economic loss, forming a vicious cycle. Ayurveda, the ancient Indian medicine, especially emphasizes this: a person's recovery must proceed in step with real economic life. Disease destroys not only the body but also the normal functioning of the family. From ancient times to today, what doctors save has never been merely the lives of individual patients, but the happiness of individual families. Hence the saying: illnesses are common, but good physicians are rare; a physician who cures with the medicine has always been a blessing to humankind.
But being a doctor is hard. After I announced that I had mild depression, several doctor and nurse friends contacted me, one after another saying I had written what was on their own hearts. Since the COVID outbreak at the end of 2019, many doctors have been worn out; several of them are in severe depression, and some have been depressed for a long time.
We lamented together that we were the lucky ones, for some colleagues have already gone to the other world because of this damned plague. We at least kept our lives, and being depressed we still have a chance to recover. Those who have left can only leave their families with a grief that can never be mended. In fact, over the next decade another major epidemic may be unavoidable; if today, chastened by pain, we plan ahead and prepare for the future, we may suffer a lot less when the time comes.
Some people ask why I can shake off depression and calm down so quickly. It relates to my own experience. I have read a great many books, and have also spent much time practicing according to the Buddhist Six Paramitas (precepts, forbearance, giving, vigor, meditation, wisdom). Though there are all manner of liberation methods, wisdom ranks first; when wisdom arrives, the other auxiliary means are optional. From the Western medical view, the radical cure of depression also relies on cognitive change, not on anything else.
The Zen school has always held that complete enlightenment happens in an instant; in an instant one is enlightened, and like the bottom falling out of a bucket, all theworries within vanishes all at once. Yet the art of that instant of enlightenment is not so easily attained.
When a person's intellect (the synthesis of wisdom and knowledge) reaches a certain level, his self-repairing ability is extraordinary. So improving one's intellect in daily life is very important. How? Reading, thinking, practicing, reflecting, generalizing, correcting errors, practicing again, cycling on and on. Only by internalizing this complete program into a required course of daily life can we truly raise our intellect efficiently. Intellect is the foundation of a person's spirit; if the foundation is not there, many things cannot be forced.
I still have a heap of problems to solve, but once I steadied my emotions, returned to a normal state, and set up this principle of "pressing on under the guidance of conscience, love and reason," everything became much simpler; life at once became orderly, and my head cleared. Many factors may be beyond our control, and many outcomes will differ from what we expect. It does not matter; following this principle, do as much as we can and reap as much as we can. Acting by the principle of "do your best on the cause, and leave the fruit to fate," setting no exaggerated expectations, and believing "to get it is my good fortune, to lose it is my lot," there is nothing to regret.
Many friends wish me happiness; in their view life can be divided simply into happy and unhappy states. But there is another very common state: calm, which lies between happiness and unhappiness. This may be the state I prefer to keep for now, or for a long time to come. Because in the next few years some predictable bereavements will occur in my life, being able to stay calm will be quite enough.
Birth, old age, illness and death, meeting the hated, parting from the loved, failing to obtain what one seeks, and the blaze of the five skandhas—the Eight Sufferings of life—mostly fall on middle-aged people. If life before middle age is like arriving at a grand banquet with more and more guests, then life after middle age is like the party ending and the guests leaving one by one; with each departure, there is one fewer person at our side.
When middle-aged people have passed through the baptism of the Eight Sufferings and can still live out the rest of their years with a calm heart and composure, that is already very good. What we need is no longer a high, resounding musical extravaganza; what we need is only a serenade to lull us to sleep.