After Twenty Days of Recovery, I Finally Could Bear It No Longer

Every adult has a fixed life pattern, and breaking that fixed pattern is almost impossible. From November 19 until today, I have spent twenty days recovering from my injuries—though these twenty days were not purely convalescence; I also did a small amount of work. This morning I resumed my habit of waking up after four o'clock, because I could no longer endure this life of ease and luxury.

From junior high onward I gradually cultivated the habit of waking early every day to study and write; this has solidified my life into a pattern that can no longer be changed. After the car accident on November 19, I experienced my first hospitalization. The twenty days from that day until yesterday were the most miserable of my life—doing nothing all day long. In recent days I have strongly felt that I was simply idling away my time and wasting my life.

Yesterday I went out and walked more than ten thousand steps, feeling only momentary dizziness four or five times, and I had no headache after returning home. I feel I no longer have any obvious sequelae. So starting today, I plan to gradually resume my normal daily life of exercise, study, writing, and work. Everyone has the lifestyle most comfortable to them; people like me are what the saying calls “people who cannot stay idle.” For me, the lifestyle composed of reading, writing, and work attracts me more than anything else in the world, and I never tire of repeating it every day.

When I was in junior high, I was selected for an advanced-placement class, and from then on weekends were no longer mine, because students in the advanced class had to attend group training at school every weekend to prepare for olympiad competitions. This was a hallmark of Huanggang education in my era; in those days, virtually every top-performing Huanggang student had this kind of experience.

I do not know whether it is because of this training or because of my innate nature that I so loathe a life of idling away time. I only know that my life has become rigidly fixed. Of course, this rigid life has not brought me trouble; living this way day after day, I feel more joy than pain. If we trace back to primary school, my greatest hobbies then were reading and fishing. Back then, our reading was something our parents desperately wanted to stop but could not—because the “idle books” we read had nothing to do with exams, and buying them cost quite a lot. So I think both innate nature and the acquired habit-forming process have shaped my current life pattern.

In fact, observing the people around me, I find that everyone's life pattern is basically fixed; we can infer their life patterns from their every move. This may be an inherent feature of us humans: we cannot change our habitual thinking and behavior patterns. Our lives seem rich and varied, but in reality they are just repetitions of some fixed, unchanging pattern—and this pattern usually formed in adolescence, with only each person's pattern differing.

When doctors treat patients with depression, anxiety disorders, and personality disorders, they find it very difficult to correct the patients' thinking patterns and lifestyles, because the thinking and behavioral habits that caused their diseases have become completely rigid and are hard for outside forces to shake. In fact, so-called normal people have the same phenomenon; it is just that we regard normal people's thinking and behavioral patterns as healthy. Precisely because our patterns are hard to change, there is the saying: “It is easier to move a mountain than to change a person's nature.”

As for eating, drinking, and merrymaking, I have never developed an interest in them to this day. I am not saying people should not eat, drink, and enjoy themselves. If someone loves these things and has solidified them into their lifestyle, I see nothing wrong with that, as long as they themselves are happy. After all, everyone lives only once; as long as they do not harm others, everyone has the right to live however they wish, and others have no right to judge.

But there is also a group of people who have no interest in eating, drinking, and merrymaking. They do not indulge in such things, nor do they make fair-weather friends. Among the Big Five personality traits, people with strong introversion are basically uninterested in feasting and revelry; they care more about their inner feelings than about external stimulation. Is strong introversion due to innate heredity or to upbringing? Personally, I think heredity plays the larger role.

Any lifestyle, as long as it is not excessive and does no harm to the body, is beyond reproach. As Russell said, the reason life is beautiful lies entirely in its diversity. If everyone in the world were of one single type, the world would be a dreadful place. Of course, from a biological standpoint, diversity is an inevitable outcome. No two living beings on earth have exactly the same genome; our phenotype (appearance, character, intelligence level, etc.) is determined by our genes, which makes each of us unique.

I am not a genetic determinist; I acknowledge the role of upbringing. But upbringing merely polishes and better develops a person's various innate talents on the basic framework laid down by genes. If we fail to recognize this and deliberately force another person to develop abilities they do not possess, the result is usually doubly effortful for half the result, or even entirely futile. I personally believe that respecting this basic biological law, respecting inborn individuality, and letting each person develop naturally—that is the best education.

I am guarding against some of the flaws in my own nature (because they have indeed brought harm to my life and health), but I have also accepted that biological self and no longer fight against my own nature. The more deeply we understand the mysteries of life, the more we realize that we have no ability to change one person into another, nor to change ourselves into a different self. Our power to reshape people is very limited; at best we can make modest adjustments to reduce the distress that certain elements of our nature cause us.