Year-End Reflections 2023: Accept Every Loss, and Grow Through Losing

The First Awareness: All conditioned things are impermanent; the world is frail and perishable. The four elements are suffering and empty; the five aggregates are without self. Arising and ceasing, transforming and changing, they are false and have no master. The mind is the source of evil; the body is the dwelling of transgression. Contemplating thus, one gradually leaves birth and death. The Second Awareness: Desiring much is suffering; the toil of birth and death arises from craving. With few desires and non-action, body and mind are at ease. The Third Awareness: The mind is insatiable, ever seeking more, increasing wrongdoing; the Bodhisattva is not thus, ever mindful of contentment, at peace in poverty and keeping the Way, taking wisdom as his task. The Fourth Awareness: Laziness leads to decline; ever practicing diligence, one breaks the evils of affliction, subdues the four demons, and escapes the prison of the aggregates and realms. The Fifth Awareness: Ignorance is birth and death; the Bodhisattva ever thinks of wide learning and much hearing, increasing wisdom and eloquence, teaching all beings and bringing them the utmost joy. The Sixth Awareness: Poverty and breeding bring resentment, wrongly forming bad ties; the Bodhisattva gives dana, regarding enemies and kin equally, not holding past wrongs, not hating evil people. The Seventh Awareness: The five desires bring harm; though a layperson, one is not stained by worldly pleasures, ever mindful of the three robes, the alms bowl and the monastic implements, vowing to leave home, keeping the Way pure and clean, living the spiritual life on high, and being compassionate to all. The Eighth Awareness: Birth and death blaze fiercely, with measureless suffering and anguish; arousing the Mahayana mind, one universally rescues all, vowing to take upon oneself the measureless suffering of all beings, that they may all attain the utmost joy.

— The Sutra of the Eight Awarenesses of Great Beings (Fo Shuo Ba Da Ren Jue Jing)

Today is the end of 2023. I cannot put into words the various pains I have experienced this year. Some pains can be spoken of, and some cannot; from time to time these pains rend the heart. I can only use willpower again and again to press these feelings down, using self-soothing techniques to comfort myself, improve my mood, and quiet my inner heart.

In any case, this year has already passed. Apart from not having experienced the suffering of meeting what one hates (because I no longer harbor hatred in my heart and bear grudge against no one in this world, so I have no such meeting with anyone), I have experienced one by one the other seven of the eight sufferings of life the Buddha spoke of—birth, old age, illness, death, parting from those one loves, not getting what one seeks, and the suffering of the five aggregates surging up. Although I know that these sufferings are a natural law that is hard to avoid in life and can be rationally accepted, the fact that human beings have emotions is itself one of the natural laws; so much of the pain in my heart can only slowly settle with the help of time.

Human beings are complex creatures. We live in groups and are bound to many members of the group by all sorts of emotions. The world is impermanent, and the various vicissitudes of life inevitably tug at our hearts, producing many sorrowful emotions. Although these emotions eventually all subside, while we are experiencing them they are objectively present.

My Big Five personality test showed a neuroticism score of only 1.7 (out of 10; most people do not score so low), placing me among those who are the most composed and calm, the least likely to panic, relatively unemotional and peaceful, not only good at regulating their own emotions but also able to attend to the emotions of those around them, able to handle even the most complex emotions in good time.

Even so, in 2023 I still felt many negative emotions. This shows that the suffering I endured this year was extraordinary; describing it as purgatory would not be an overstatement. I do not hide my true feelings. I am not willing to conceal the pain in my heart just to maintain an image of being "strong" and "positive and optimistic," because I cannot accept a false self.

A person whose underlying disposition is positive and optimistic will also experience pain; a person whose underlying disposition is negative and pessimistic will also have happy moments. So-called positive and negative are not absolute concepts; they are merely tendencies. A person's mindset is like a number line running from extreme pessimism to extreme optimism, and each of us falls in different intervals at different stages of life.

People differ in their ability to regulate emotion. Some can shift themselves from pessimism to optimism more quickly when they suffer; others lack this flexibility and remain in a maladaptive state for a long time. When our inner heart falls ill, what we most need is to improve our ability to regulate emotion and increase our flexibility; this is the truest face of life.

If a person must label themselves, I hope everyone labels themselves positive and optimistic, because this brings more positive psychological suggestion and lets us feel more joy.

Although I suffered much this year, fortunately I have finally come through the hardest period. Now I am getting better day by day, recovering toward a stable and positive state. Moreover, after enduring the wind, frost, rain, and snow of this year, I have repaired some flaws in my character, and my inner heart has become stronger than before.

There have been three hardest periods in my life: the period of confusion in 1998 when I first entered university amid a survival crisis; the period of disillusionment in 2012 from the pain of losing my mother; and the midlife crisis I experienced in 2023, a year of frequent mishaps.

But fortune and misfortune depend on each other in life. With each such major crisis, my mind grows rapidly. After one is not crushed by hardship, one becomes more mature and strong. The road of life is still long, and there is much more sweetness and bitterness waiting for me ahead.

I dare not say I have attained such complete enlightenment that everything is suddenly clear. As the Japanese doctor Dr. Shigeaki Hinohara said, exploring one's own inner world is an endless process. He lived to over a hundred and still felt he did not understand himself well enough, that there were still places within him to explore. I think that in future I will certainly still need to continue exploring my inner world; this may also be the most meaningful part of life. If everything for the rest of my life already had answers and I only had to live according to a script, that would be an especially boring thing.

Zeng Guofan had a classic motto: "Knock out a tooth and swallow it with the blood." Living in this world, there are far too many times when we need such a spirit, because some pains can only be borne hard. From the perspective of biological neurology, many psychological traumas lead to changes in the body's neurotransmitters, and these changes need a certain time to return to normal. On these matters, no one is an exception. At such times, endurance is the only antidote. When a rational person suffers a pain whose outcome cannot be changed, the best recourse is also to endure; because any other choice will only make things worse.

The elderly Mr. Zhou Youguang dictated a personal history entitled Passing Years Like Water—A Century Dictated by Zhou Youguang. In this book, the centenarian looked back on his hundred-year life, which was truly eventful. For various historical reasons, he lost all his property several times, was left with almost nothing, and lost family members; he had to start over again and again. Therefore, everything we possess today can turn to nothingness in an instant, and a person need not cling too tightly to what they have.

He was once troubled by depression, but in the end he became an open-minded and optimistic person and lived to 114. As an atheist with no religious belief, he kept a clear mind until his final moments, spending his whole life in constant exploration.

This is the real life. Stretching a person's life out to a hundred years and viewing it against an era of constant war and upheaval, we see the truth of life more clearly: that truth is the impermanence of the world, that all so-called possessions are merely mirror flowers and moon reflected in water, and that a person can be left with nothing at any time. Only a heart that can recover quickly after loss can cope with this eventful life. Cherish when you have, let go when you lose; only thus will we not be utterly destroyed by the vicissitudes of life.

I am 44 this year, and I do not know whether I can live past 80. If I can live to 80 or even over 100, I will certainly experience many new vicissitudes and more gains and losses. Can I live all my life in peaceful times? Will major plagues return again and again over the next ten, twenty, or thirty years? Will my lifetime see warfare or prolonged natural disasters, such that people can barely feed themselves and the historical phenomenon of cannibalism reappears? All of these are unknowns, but the probability of their occurring is high.

Because the human population has reached an unprecedented, astonishing number, the human species has entered a biological cycle of on-years and off-years, and such cycles are accompanied by all sorts of turbulence. It takes the combined action of plagues, disease, war, famine, and human fear of childbearing to cut the population back to a state balanced with resources and the environment before things settle.

The Roman philosopher Seneca, who had been tutor and advisor to the emperor Nero, made a brilliant statement about the role of philosophy: he believed the ultimate purpose of studying philosophy is to attain a state of wisdom, learning to avoid excessive reactions such as rage, self-pity, anxiety, resentment, self-righteousness, and prejudice when encountering setbacks.

He had possessed much, but while possessing it all he had long since thought that one day he might lose it all; therefore he had no possessiveness toward what he had. At the moment the tyrant ordered his death, he chose composure and met it calmly.

Meeting disaster and setback is an unavoidable experience of life. The most important thing in life is not to avoid disasters and setbacks entirely—for they are unavoidable; sooner or later, everyone experiences some. Therefore we should master as early as possible the ability to calmly accept disasters and setbacks whose outcomes we cannot control. We must continually improve our ability to adapt to loss; only thus can we live more fully during the time we are alive.

Not long ago I had a long talk with my family. I told them that if I meet with any further misfortune in this life, I hope they will not grieve too much for me. If that misfortune is not enough to take my life, then as long as I still have books to read, my inner heart will soon return to calm and my personal happiness will not be too poor. If that misfortune takes my life, I hope they will not think my life was bitter and will not grieve for me. They should believe that I was immersed most of the time in an enjoyable and happy state. I taught my family to take gains and losses lightly, to handle negative emotions rationally, and to come out of their pain quickly when they lose me.

I also told them that we need not hold too clinging an attachment to any of the external possessions we have. Life is still very long; war, natural disasters, and man-made calamities may, for all sorts of reasons, make us go through the process from nothing to something and from something back to nothing. The constant alternation of having and not-having is the normal state of life. Only if the whole family maintains this detached mindset can the other members continue to live calmly when all wealth is lost or when one or more family members are lost. That is enough.

The greatest problem of life is that we cannot permanently possess anything, including our own lives. Everything we have only seems to be possessed by us for a stage. I use the word "seems" because there is a truth many people are unwilling to look squarely at: so-called possession is less a real owning than our imagining that we own.

Do we possess wealth? No. If we do not consume it, we cannot be said to own it; and after we consume it, we have also lost it. Do we possess the people we love? No. They are all independent individuals who have never truly belonged to us. Do we possess our lives? No. We have merely borrowed from nature an unknown number of years, and at any time we may have to return our lives.

Possession is only a sweet self-deception, a fantasy that makes us feel good about ourselves. Actually, breaking this fantasy would make people more comfortable. But many people spend their whole lives immersed in this fantasy, unable to extricate themselves. When possessing, they are burdened by what they possess, day and night fearing they will lose it and adding to their anxiety; at the moment of loss, they sink into pain and cannot free themselves.

Everything in this world has only a limited relationship with us. These relationships arise from the convergence of causes and conditions, and when conditions change, they vanish from our world. But if we do not forcibly cut "ourselves" off from the world "outside us" into two worlds, we will find that everything we have lost has not truly been lost; it is still in this world, merely in another place or another form, playing some other role. If we are willing to accept all this and give up possessiveness, our sense of "loss" will fade considerably.

For this reason, I am willing to set aside all my selfish desires as a person and live in another state—a state that is both with-self and without-self. There is a self because I am still needed by others and must abide by worldly rules, existing in some form in this world; there is no self because deep down I have already transcended and departed from all this, entering a state of "utter emptiness." To use Li Shenzhi's words: "Knowing all forms are no-forms, yet wishing to be without feeling, feeling remains."

Human beings both exist in the universe and do not exist in the universe. We exist because we are indeed a real, visible and tangible entity, and the various things in secular society connected to us are also visible and tangible. We do not exist because the various "existences" we have artificially defined, if examined philosophically to the depths, are actually "nothing." If we cannot see through the essence of this "nothing" and mistakenly believe that we "have," we breed many unnecessary desires and worries.

Such thinking, which seems abstract but actually touches the essence of all things, helps us better soothe ourselves when we lose. Everyone inevitably suffers various traumas and death; at root these are all a kind of "loss." When we undergo loss, while bearing the pain it brings, we must also learn to mourn the loss, reduce the pain it causes, and move on.

If we cannot mourn the loss, cannot accept it in mourning, but instead keep dwelling on it and cannot get over the hurdle, we will live our whole lives in this world carrying the pain of loss. We will continue, with a maladaptive mindset, to accumulate more traumas repeatedly, reinforcing this painful experience. Over time, our mind will fall ill. Bearing pain and accepting loss are among the required courses of our lives. A major task of psychotherapy is to teach patients the skills of bearing pain and accepting loss, so that their wounded minds can be reborn, releasing the emotions or feelings pent up in their hearts and no longer remaining in a suppressed state for long.

If you feel the above views are somewhat contradictory, and feel that you yourself are sometimes contradictory, do not be surprised. Just as everyone may experience both happiness and pain, everything about us presents two contradictory sides. This is how the Creator designed living things: it made all things exist in opposing yet complementary pairs, so that all things achieve self-balance. In ancient Chinese terms, this is maintaining the balance of yin and yang; in a biological term, it is using opposite sides to regulate each other and maintain the homeostasis of all things.

Our lives sway among various contradictions, and the ideal state is to reach balance after the swaying. We are designed this way at the genetic level. We have oncogenes (genes that promote cancer growth) and tumor-suppressor genes (genes that inhibit cancer growth, such as the wild-type P53 gene); when the two are evenly matched, we do not get cancer. We have osteoblasts (which promote bone growth) and osteoclasts (which break down excessive bone growth); when the two are evenly matched, we do not grow into monsters.

The bad side of a thing always hides the good side, and the good side always carries the bad side. Misfortune is what fortune leans on, and fortune is what misfortune lurks in. Sometimes we are happy, sometimes sad; sometimes we hate people we like very much, and sometimes we like people we hate very much. These are all normal phenomena. As long as they are not excessive, they do not affect our lives. But once these reactions become extreme and rigid, unable to adjust naturally and smoothly, so that we cannot adapt to our surroundings, constantly conflict with others, and find no peace within, then they affect our normal lives.

So if we encounter all sorts of "losses" in life, mourn fully when it is time to mourn; when mourning ends, let the pain fade and move on. When the day of the ultimate loss (the death of one's own body) arrives, everything can end. The rights and wrongs, successes and failures, joys and sorrows of this life are not so important; our life is simply a straightforward journey.

If we handle cognition and emotion properly, we can live a little happier than others; if we handle them poorly, we will have a little more pain. A little more or a little less does not make that huge a difference. Take these matters more lightly; I believe that in the journey of life we will be more relieved, more open-minded, and can slightly raise our happiness and improve our quality of life.

I cannot give this piece I have written a precise definition; let me call it the wisdom of living that I have realized in the process of losing. I do not much like mystifying the concept of the wisdom of living. Actually, the essence of the wisdom of living is simply the biological concept of adaptability. Adaptability is a capacity we should all continually improve; so-called mental growth, in my view, is nothing but the improvement of adaptability.