Life Insights ⁽³⁰⁵⁾

I am going to Shanghai tomorrow. Today my wife looked for clothes for me to wear on the trip. Searching and searching, she could not find many garments she thought presentable enough to go out and meet people in; the newest clothes were bought three…

Among the various philosophies of survival, the one I most esteem is sui yu er an—being at peace whatever one encounters. Whatever comes, one meets it calmly and takes it as a matter of course, unaffected by the outside world or by one's own lot.

Whenever anything is taken to an extreme, it produces abuses; once abuses arise, they will eventually develop into vulgar customs. For example, Confucius spoke of filial piety, sometimes with a rigidity that was itself a flaw. This abuse, carried to an extreme, produced the vulgar…

If we want to live freely, naturally, and without constraint or worry in this world, we must first temper our own hearts. The outside world is never free of storms. Only when we have tempered our inner self to a state of strength that is…

During high school, my beloved teacher Li Lixin once chatted with me in the hallway and said: "Zhiyuan, don't always think of yourself as a savior!" On another occasion, he wrote a comment after one of my articles: "Don't show your edge too sharply; learn…

Last night, my son asked me: "Dad, you've written so many articles—have you ever thought about publishing a book?" I told him that before he was born, Dad had already published quite a few books, but never under my own name. My son asked why…

The greatest burdens of worldly life are vanity and lies. Living in such an environment, the waste of time is astonishing, and the number of trivial words spoken each day is incalculable. So if a person can put up a wall between themselves and the…

On May 21, 2016, the most influential cancer community on the Chinese internet—the Patient-Friend Blog Circle—held its tenth-anniversary gathering in Tianjin. I became connected with this circle because of my mother's cancer, and through it formed life-and-death bonds with countless cancer patients, their families, and…

I used to think I understood the meaning of the line "a confidant within the four seas makes the far horizon like a neighbor," until one day I found that my previous understanding of it had been superficial and wrong. Only when a true confidant,…

In the evening, I went alone to the park and sat cross-legged on a bench beneath the mottled old pagoda. In meditation, a voice rang in my ears and said to me: "Zhiyuan, come home with me!" Home—how warm those two words are—but where is…