Reducing All the Way: Neither Giving Up nor Forcing Things

I finally gave up the lease on my office space. After two days of hustle, I packed the last things in the room and moved them home, and arranged with the landlord to return the keys this weekend. From now on I will mainly do Chinese anticancer consultation work online, until the pandemic settles.

The office lease did not expire for another ten days or so, and I was not in a hurry to move back so soon. But last night’s news reported an outbreak in a residential compound less than a thousand meters from my home—the closest outbreak to my house since COVID-19 began.

Fresh out of the shower, I immediately took action, hauling a trolley to move. Fearing that expanded lockdown measures might follow and affect our compound, leaving it too late to move, I moved all the important things back that very night; the rest I had intended to discard. Luckily, although checks around here became much stricter during the day, our compound had not yet been locked down. So I moved for another day and finally got everything moved.

That room, which had doubled as study and office, was completely vacated. Several times this year friends had dissuaded me from giving up the lease, but income and expenses could not balance, and I was unwilling to add pressure to others, so I finally made up my mind to leave.

It has been over ten years since my mother was diagnosed with cancer. Every day I have risen to read before four in the morning, writing incessantly. Looking in the mirror, I see many more white hairs on my head. I once thought my biological clock could never change, but in the last month or so, having set aside the pressure of exams and the rental, I can sleep until six. Over these years I have borne the weight of life and death for many people, and endlessly had to deal with exams, demanding of myself extremely high standards, basically reading and writing every day; few can understand this burden.

As a Chinese medicine practitioner who switched to medicine mid-career through apprenticeship, I also often face discrimination: those with formal training look down on us, and some patients look down on us too—though, to be honest, most of my patients affirm my efficacy. Over these years the administrative departments’ inaction has delayed our examinations again and again; I have truly been worn to exhaustion by them and have lost interest and enthusiasm for all manner of assessments.

On this trip back home, sitting before my mother’s grave, looking at the ragwort that has grown taller than me, I thought that decades hence, I shall most likely be buried here; my son will probably not return regularly to clear the weeds from the grave. By then I will have merged with the weeds here; what will the things I cared about in life matter, decades on?

At that moment I let go of many things: exams, career, professional titles, and social status no longer mattered. I no longer obsess over curing cancer; doing my utmost to help patients extend survival, with a clear conscience, is enough.

Since then my sleep has improved step by step; in the last twenty days or so I have not woken before four in the morning, and always wake only after half past five.

Next year I want to garden well, read, and study medicine, setting no goals at all—neither in study nor in life, nor in the family’s finances. Nor will I take on too much pressure; it is enough if the whole family has food and clothing. The burdens I carried in the past were too heavy, sustained entirely by my own willpower. Now I want to solve this problem at its root, because if this life goes on too long I will develop fatigue and lose interest in medicine.

I want to treat studying and practicing medicine as something enjoyable rather than as a task to complete. After two days of toil, last night, having finished moving, I adjusted a formula for a patient; the patient’s daughter told me that some of her father’s problems, which he had sought treatment for over ten years and seen many doctors in Beijing without result, were resolved after taking the medicine I prescribed. Hearing such words made me very happy, and more than half my fatigue vanished.

I reflect that when I myself was ill and sought treatment, I saw countless doctors, including academicians; which one solved my problem? In the end I solved my own problem. Only by solving my own and others’ ailments can I deeply appreciate the joy of studying medicine.

From now on I will study medicine single-mindedly and, as fate allows, help patients who trust me. Everything else will go with the flow. Life after the pandemic can certainly never return to the way it was, but is the new way of life not itself maturing? Forget the past and move toward the future. I will keep working hard, but I will no longer force things; improving my sleep quality matters more than anything.