Reading, Writing and Growing Vegetables
This year my life has grown ever simpler. At present my daily themes are only reading, writing and growing vegetables. Because of the pandemic, I have had almost no face-to-face contact for nearly half a year. I have bought quite a few e-books from online bookshops, and my daily reading time is much longer than before. Apart from about four or five hours of activity and work (over an hour of which is farm work in the garden) and three meals a day, the rest of my time is basically spent reading and writing.
My mood has gradually settled. I do not know how much longer this way of life will continue: in the first half of the year I worried for my home in Hubei; in the second half, the situation in Beijing, where I now live, grew tense. Everyone is cautious even buying groceries, and life has been greatly affected for all. To say I am perfectly calm would be false, but as this long struggle has worn on, my nerves have gradually loosened. Aside from being careful when I go out, everything else has gradually sorted itself out under the new normal.
Lately, besides medical books, I have been reading a good deal of history and classical literature.
Reading history broadens the mind. The historian L. S. Stavrianos, in his famous A Global History: From Prehistory to the 21st Century, wrote: "The earth on which we live revolves around the sun, which is but one of the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, and the galaxy is but one of millions of galaxies in the universe... The earth in the universe is as small as a speck of dust on the Pacific." Placing our gaze in boundless time and space, we see that everything happening now is but a tiny event in humanity's long survival. Similar events have occurred again and again in history; there is nothing surprising. They are challenges we inevitably face while living on this planet.
Classical literature opens another world rich in beauty. Zhang Zhihe's "Before Xisai Hill the egrets fly; peach blossoms flow and the mandarin fish is fat. In a blue bamboo hat and a green rain cloak, in slanting breeze and fine rain I need not return" and Liu Zongyuan's "The fisherman moors for the night by the western cliff; at dawn he draws from the clear Xiang and burns Chu bamboo. Smoke clears, the sun rises, no man is seen; with an oar's sound, the mountains and waters turn green. Looking back, he has drifted mid-stream; on the cliff, the purposeless clouds chase each other"—both are full of beauty. This is not a beauty reserved for the great; it is within reach of countless ordinary people like me. Looking out at the cosmos, we are indeed insignificant, yet our insignificant lives can also be full of poetry and art.
Fishing, woodcutting, plowing and reading are the four most ordinary occupations in an agrarian society. To a person content with what he has, every ordinary occupation is full of beauty and joy. The life I now lead counts as a plowing-and-reading life. Plowing has its joy: watching the vegetables I have planted grow day by day fills my heart with delight. Reading has its joy: finding a book I wish I had read earlier fills my heart with delight. Writing has its joy too: turning out a passable article, I look at it with quiet satisfaction.
A joyful heart is the best medicine for sorrow. Rather than being glum, I prefer to immerse myself in the life I love and enjoy being alive. My high-school math teacher once told me: "You have a great ability to adapt; you can adapt to almost any environment—that is rare." I was too young then to understand what he meant. Only after growing up and living through life's storms did I grasp my teacher's feelings, as an adult, when he said those words.
Life cannot stand still; favorable and adverse circumstances shift at every moment. Only one who can adapt to the environment will not let his heart be tossed by circumstances. Living with a blaming, resentful heart only makes oneself miserable. We cannot change the outside world, but we can adjust our own mood. So let us do what we can, and leave what we cannot do now to time, to history.
Live with both feet on the ground, and the days will no longer feel so hard. The only unchanging rule of life is that things are always changing. Yet all changes return to the same root: we are all but parts of nature, unable to escape the natural laws of birth, aging, illness and death. To live out our years as long as possible, and as freely and comfortably as possible, is enough.