The Vegetables Have Run Wild
Because of the toothache and the hospital extraction, I had not been to the vegetable plot for three days. This evening I went to water the vegetables. In just three days, the vegetables in the garden had run wild. I picked some golden-leaf chard, youmai lettuce, spinach, romaine, cabbage, celtuce, Chinese chives, large-leaf crown daisy and fine-leaf haozi stalks to take home. This year’s vegetables were sown around March 20; planted nearly two months ago, it is now time for the harvest. We no longer need to buy vegetables at home; what we grow is more than we can eat, and I must start giving some away to neighbors, relatives and friends.
I cycled to the garden at a fairly fast pace, still as agile as a twenty-year-old. I love this feeling of being almost fully in command of my body; a person at the peak of vitality is happiest. It has been 48 hours since the two wisdom teeth were pulled; now, holding a mouthful of plain water in the mouth stops the pain. My bicycle basket held a large cup of cooled boiled water; from time to time I took a sip, held it in my mouth and swallowed slowly, and the extraction site basically stopped aching. The body recovers quickly; long-term exercise and vitamin supplementation really do help.
Whenever the vegetables come in, going out to the plot and looking at what I have grown, I truly love and marvel at this life. I always think how wonderful it would be to live like this for a lifetime. But the world is unpredictable; no one knows what tomorrow will bring, or whether life will change utterly. It is better to live with an attitude of letting things be. Today, I love this visible, tangible rural life; if tomorrow brings a different scene, then I will adapt to and love that other life. A person who loves life should love whatever form fate arranges, finding joy in each new life as it comes, rather than fixating on its troubles.
I do not like to complain for long. After a night’s sleep, whatever unpleasantness there was before bed is put down, so regret and pain do not linger long in me. Life always has its disappointments, but I think that for a basically healthy person, there is far more that goes right. It is just that many people keep their eyes fixed on the disappointments, brooding over them, and so cannot see the beauty that makes up the vast majority of life.
Wherever I go, the earth pulls me back to childhood. I used to miss my hometown; gradually I no longer do, because the earth is everywhere, and everywhere is my home. As long as there is a patch of land that is temporarily mine, where I can cultivate, I feel fully rooted and happy. Do not pursue permanent possession of anything; such pursuit is unrealistic. Even our own lives are only temporary — how much more so everything else? If a person is content with this “temporary” state, I cannot think of what else could make us anxious over gain and loss.
“Temporary” and “change” are the two most important keywords in every life. Temporarily possessing, constantly changing — this is the essence of our life. If we can accept this, we can easily be happy in each present moment. I love being close to the earth; I enjoy this life of watching crops grow every day. Such a life keeps the heart calm. Like other living things, we need only enough food to live; working the land ourselves ensures that, whatever happens, we will not lose heart in life. Even if outside waves surge mountain-high, as long as our roots are firmly in the earth, our inner peace and happiness remain unshaken.
I had a female classmate, one of the girls I secretly admired in middle school. Once she said to me: “Your life is what we call living; most of us are merely surviving.”
In truth, I think it is the reverse: I have always taken survival itself as the purpose of living, whereas many people hope there is something higher than survival in life. They cannot be satisfied with mere survival, while I can. In the end, the person who asks only to survive seems, to others, to be living happily; the person with higher demands of life thinks himself merely surviving. This sounds a bit convoluted, but I believe it holds some philosophical truth. If a person can be satisfied simply by being alive, life cannot trouble us.
Not long ago, a breast-cancer patient came to Beijing for further training and visited me along the way. The last time we had met was five or six years earlier. Over these five or six years her condition has been stable (she is very grateful to me for this, though I do not think the credit is mine), and her outlook has changed greatly; she is now a different person, softer, quieter and more graceful than before. She used to be the sort who, after quarreling with her husband, would not speak to him for half a month; now she is far more magnanimous. The face follows the mind; you can see her inner state in how she looks now.
After we discussed some questions of spiritual philosophy, we agreed to meet again in another five or six years. I believe that when we meet, she will be even better than now. By then she may have accepted everything in this world, and her estrogen-fueled breast cancer may no longer trouble her — because emotion really can disturb a person’s endocrine system. I believe that one day she will cultivate into someone whose heart contains all things and who is at ease with whatever comes; after all, nothing reshapes a person more than cancer.
People prone to anxiety and depression do have a somewhat higher risk of cancer than average. I sometimes recommend “horticultural therapy” to some patients, urging them to grow a garden or some flowers and plants as I do. Horticultural therapy does much to change a person’s outlook; as we care for plants, their growth brings us much peace and joy, and that peace and joy free us from anxiety and depression.
Every stage of a plant’s growth gives us a new understanding of life. Watching seeds sprout, seedlings grow, branches spread, flowers open and fruit form makes a person more patient. Happy and unhappy people alike encounter difficulties; the difference is that happy people have more patience to overcome them. They know how to accept and respond unhurriedly to everything. To my mind, that is the greatest difference between them and unhappy people.
Some psychologists use the concept of “delayed gratification” to describe patience with life. The term is too technical, but its essence is simply what we often call being unhurried and unflappable. In these psychologists’ view, the ability to delay gratification is the key to resisting anxiety and depression and reaping happiness. Actually, I would say it is not hard to achieve; in the daily work of our hands, we easily hone the ability to delay gratification.