👀 Preface

Second year in a row not going home for Spring Festival — but this year I’m not spending it alone. I came to Dongguan to be at my older sister’s. Because of the holiday, even my reading pace has slowed down. Every day I’m playing with my two nephews — a two-year-old and a five-year-old, both bigger troublemakers than the other. Even little kids can tell I’m the easiest pushover. They keep running at me to yank my glasses off and grab at my face. I think I tolerate all of it not because I particularly like them, but because they’re my sister’s kids. When I was little I used to trail along behind my sister everywhere. She’d bring me cute little cakes when she came home, take me clothes shopping, watch movies with me, lie in bed with me to chat and sleep, tell me things I didn’t know yet. Back then I thought she was an incredibly cool grown-up, and I loved her.

Today downstairs I got hit with a wave of flower scent. I don’t know what kind it was, couldn’t see anything in any direction, but maybe spring is quietly arriving. Yellow fallen leaves are embedded in the asphalt, slowly rotting, until little by little they vanish. My brief stretch of not-having-to-work is almost up too. A few days ago I gave my résumé another light revision — I keep revising and revising and it never quite feels right. The thought of going back to a clock-in life of home–office–home–office makes my hand clench into a fist. But there’s no helping it. My savings keep dwindling, and although I didn’t go back home for the holiday, I still sent my mom a red envelope and bought some Guangdong specialty gift boxes for the relatives. I don’t live in a vacuum — every so often I have to step back into reality.

Compared to spending the holidays with other people, I still prefer being alone. I want to go wherever I want, lie down whenever, eat whenever, without having to accommodate anyone else’s habits. It’s freeing. In my little rented room I feel like that’s the entire world, and I could stay in there a whole month without going out.

🖋 Letting Other People Be Themselves

Kids do not act according to grown-up wishes. With kids I can really sense my own controlling impulse — that sudden urgent rush to the top of my head wanting them to stop, to change what they’re doing, because I find their behavior dumb and slow. And then the urge to step in and help them so that everything runs my way, efficiently — that’s a desire to control everything, restless, twitching to surface every so often. The moment I noticed this in myself, I started wondering when I’d turned into one of these tedious adults. My outstretched hand pulled back of its own accord.

A while back I watched a video by some blogger who’d read a book — I forget the title, but I remember this line: Letting others be free is letting yourself be free. So I decided that whenever I catch my “controlling impulse” surfacing, I’ll quietly remind myself: The world doesn’t turn on my will. I have to let other people be themselves.

📗 I May Be Wrong

I spent a full week reading this book, in fits and starts — it’s called I May Be Wrong. The author, Björn, was an economist. Even though he didn’t actually like economics, he graduated with top marks, joined a multinational firm, and became CFO young. Worldly success didn’t make him happy — he felt like he was playing a part, pretending to be passionate and engaged about economics, and his thoughts kept tumbling into the spiral of anxiety, depression, and helplessness. After encountering meditation and the pursuit of inner peace, he decided to quit, abandon everything, and go to Thailand to become a forest monk. To put it simply, he renounced lay life.

What moved me most in this book is the author’s openness and clarity — for instance, that he’d nod off during meditation, that he stayed a monk for seventeen years and then disrobed and returned to ordinary life. I myself can’t make it three minutes into a meditation before I can’t keep my eyes open (forehead in hand, wry smile dot jpg). The difficulty of fitting back in after withdrawing from and then re-entering the world — he writes about that with the same plainness and honesty. It’s a really enjoyable read, with little wisps of humor surfacing here and there, where you smile knowingly, as if you’ve stepped into the author’s world and waved at him.

Not expecting life to unfold the way we think or feel it should — recognizing our fundamental ignorance and unknowing — that is wisdom.

I may be wrong. I may be wrong. I may be wrong.

🎨 Spotting the Beauty in Small Things

When I’m out walking, I love looking around — and when something catches my interest, I’ll give it more than one or two glances. On the second day of Spring Festival I went with my sister and her family to Window of the World to watch a drone show. We walked in and right away I saw the Little Prince seated on Asteroid B-612, with a single bright star hanging in the half-darkened sky. He was waving to the crowd in the afterglow of sunset. (My image hosting isn’t set up yet, so I can’t put a photo here.) Looking down at the dense crowd below, did the Little Prince think it was noisy? Did he feel a little lonely up there on his own?

How can there be this many people on this planet? I keep asking. Mother Earth holds so many of us — she really is the most magnificent thing in existence. Watching crowd-on-crowd flowing all around me, I still get heart palpitations and a slight feeling of can’t-quite-breathe. All I can do is try not to look directly at the crowd, hold my breath, and keep my breathing as steady as I can. Looks like I’m just not going to overcome this. It’s too early to make that call, maybe, but the palpitations are so awful that I’ll go on living comfortably inside my self-built greenhouse and listen to what my body’s telling me.

Walking around sometimes I spot a tiny cluster of clover poking up through the seam between the asphalt and the sidewalk — bend down for a closer look, hoping I’ve found a four-leaf one. Small and short as they are, they’re a vivid, vigorous green, bursting with life. The force of life is unexpectedly strong. Every thing in the world embarks on its own marvelous journey in its own way. We’re just passing by, and that alone feels beautiful. From the tiny minutiae of life — occasionally looking up at the sapphire-blue sky, at clouds like cotton candy in the distance, at the curved sliver of moon hanging in the evening, at the shadow of leaves woven with sunlight — pausing on tiptoe to step carefully over a line of ants moving house, wondering how a turtle sleeps, how a crab eats — all of this makes me feel happy. They’re insignificant things, not worth bringing up to anyone else, but the nourishment I draw from them keeps feeding me. Coming home from a tiring workday, I look up and see the moon, and it has been walking me home the whole way. I keep looking up at it as I go, and it seems to be saying: I’m here. In that moment, I feel held by nature and the universe — so I should go home and call my mom. PS. Back in high school I once found a four-leaf clover in the grass at school. It did not, in fact, bring me any luck. :(

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