Respecting the Laws of Nature May Lead to Better Outcomes
I rented a small vegetable plot near Sijiqing Town in Haidian District, Beijing (each small plot costs 2,000 yuan a year; I rented two) and grow vegetables there. Many of my fellow gardeners have years of experience, so when I first arrived and they saw my uneven beds and poorly made ridges, they eagerly taught me how to shape the beds and ridges. When I transplanted the seedlings, they also warmly showed me how to garden.
I could not follow most of their advice, because compared with them my time is very tight. Each time I go to the plot, I rush there and rush back; their advice takes a great deal of time. Their gardens are trimmed like exquisite little flower beds; I can only envy them. I basically have no time to weed, so my beds are full of weeds, whereas my neighbors can keep a single weed out of theirs.
At first my wife and I felt truly clumsy and embarrassed by our vegetables. Recently, as the various vegetables have begun to ripen, my little plot has yielded well--perhaps a bit too well compared with my neighbors. Their eggplants were planted earlier and tended far better than mine, yet their eggplant yield is lower than mine; the other vegetables are much the same.
The neighbor to my east is said to be a vegetable expert, and the one to the west a landscape expert--there are so many experts in Beijing. Any random person around us might be a nationally known authority, renowned in their field or the author of many books. Yet the vegetables grown by these two 'experts' yield less than those of me, a country kid.
I have found that these 'gardeners' who never did farming are armchair enthusiasts (they are like the many amateur readers of medical books who never treat patients--'plain, yet so confident'). They prune and snip their vegetables far too eagerly, almost as if growing houseplants. They think too many branches will reduce fruiting, so whenever a fork appears they snip it off at once.
I prune too, but only roughly, not as finely as they do. Back in the countryside, farmers do not prune like this every day (honestly, if villagers spent this much time on a tiny plot, they could never farm all their land). For us, pruning once every ten days or two weeks is already good. To them, our pruning is painful to watch; they think our work is quite crude.
They seem to look things up for every vegetable they plant, and pass the rules around until everyone follows them. Some vegetables are drought-tolerant, so they water rarely; as a result their lettuce grows as thin as a thumb and their eggplants wither, leaves drooping. I water roughly two or three times a week; my neighbors warned me several times that I would rot the roots. My vegetables not only did not rot, but grew far better than theirs. My lettuce is about as thick as what is sold in the market, and my eggplants are abundant and fine.
I think these neighbors do not respect the laws of nature. They ignore that plants need sunlight and water, and that green leaves photosynthesize solar energy into biomass; as a result, their harvest is poor. When I first arrived I was indeed intimidated by them, but at harvest time we have to admit: when it comes to growing vegetables, we country kids are more practical; when it comes to weeding and pruning, the experts win.
Before I was twenty, I spent most of my time in the countryside, helping my parents with farm work, so I understand how crops grow. Though I have been away from the village for years, I still remember how to grow crops; my practical experience is far stronger than these hobbyist neighbors. Most crops need luxuriant foliage to bear abundant fruit. Vegetables grown for looks violate the basic laws of crop growth and are doomed not to thrive.
Most city people who garden by the book cannot out-yield us country folk. It is not just gardening; education is the same. A whole person is not produced by educational theory--real life cultivates a whole person. The richer life is, the more complete the personality; conversely, an impoverished life only produces fragmented personalities. Medicine even has a category called mental disability. I strongly dislike today's education: teachers, parents and students all sacrifice the life experiences a child should have in order to chase exam scores. Families and schools have turned children into exam machines, and in today's hyper-competitive climate the trend is worsening.
Without branches and leaves for photosynthesis, a plant cannot absorb enough solar energy or flower and fruit properly. How can a person, with no life experience beyond study and exams, grow up whole? Without play, children hardly experience life's joy; without friends, how will they develop empathy? Without travel, if they are only asked to appreciate mountains and rivers through poetry, how will they ever truly love those mountains and rivers?
When my son was in kindergarten, people told me: 'Your child is gifted; competition at school is fierce. You should make a comprehensive plan--send him to a series of enrichment and competition classes, and arm yourself to fight alongside him, so that his chances at Tsinghua or Peking improve.' I flatly refused. I would rather he grow more slowly, rather sacrifice his so-called 'future' (what counts as sacrificing someone's future is probably only known when the coffin is closed), than have a dull childhood. Most of the depressed patients I have known were unhappy in childhood; as adults they do not know where life's meaning or pleasure lies, and doctors exhaust every means yet cannot make them happy again.
A lifetime is long. There is much to experience, and far more skills to learn outside books than inside them. Only in a rich and varied life can a child feel the beauty of existence and gain enough spiritual strength to face life's trials: birth, aging, illness and death, parting from loved ones, meeting the hateful, the unattainable, and the fervent turmoil of the five aggregates. We all know spiritual strength is vital, yet few think to do enough inner training, which is why so many people live in pain.
Medicine is the same. Today's medical establishment resembles my gardening neighbors. Specialization is too fine; most doctors treat patients by the book, 'pruning' the human body--and the more they prune, the shorter the patient's life. We ignore humanity's natural nature. Although we know that joy, anger, sorrow, economic status, social relationships and habits all affect health, we do not truly know how to use these laws to reduce suffering.
I recently got a cat. Sometimes I play with it, making sounds to attract it and train its jumping. I have found that my three-month-old kitten can pinpoint exactly where a sound comes from and jump precisely to the source. This ability, evolved over countless years in nature, is beyond any medical technology we possess.
How does it judge the source so precisely, calculate the jump height and the force it needs, and exert that force so accurately? If we calculated it by the laws of mechanics, we might spend enormous effort, yet the cat does all of this in an instant. Every living thing has innate gifts evolved over countless generations; their power is astonishing.
Doctors should respect the laws of nature (including death) and use them to help people reduce or escape suffering. I even think that, when death is unavoidable, giving the patient and family proper death education is more correct than injections and pills. The dying patients I have known mostly longed for release, but their families insisted on prolonging their lives, tormenting them. In fact, a natural death is a fine, once-and-for-all release from the pain of serious illness. The ancients said: for minor illness, seek a doctor; for major illness, accept death. There is truth in this. When disease reaches a certain severity, living is truly worse than dying; at that point death is a comfortable release.
Humanity has always tried to understand nature, itself, and the laws of all things. It is the attempts of countless people that gave rise to medicine, philosophy, psychology and biology. The laws we have grasped tell us how to live, how to accept an imperfect life, and a very imperfect but unavoidable ending--death.
Respecting the laws of nature may yield a result we cannot accept, yet objectively it may be the best result. Anyway, life is not only about getting what we want; disappointment is an important part of life and no one can avoid it. If the only peaches in the box are rotten, pick the one that is relatively least rotten!