开天窗 Open the Skylight

AI-generated translation.

If you were allowed to do only one thing for your whole life, what would you choose?

Last winter I asked a lot of people this question. Classmate Xiao B said that the fact that I mull over questions like this is a sign of depression. Actually, I’m not as profound as he thinks. I was only trying, while job hunting, to focus my limited energy in one direction, but I had no idea how to choose.

In the end I still launched a full-scale attack and cast my net everywhere, leaving myself in a terrible mess. From the very beginning there was the panic of not getting what I wanted and the sleepless nights of anxiety; later came the repeated entanglement of having to choose. In the middle of it all, I exhausted every rational line of thought I could think of, trying to weigh things from every angle. Some people said that while you’re young, you should go to different places and broaden your horizons, or else when you’re old you won’t even have stories to brag about. Others said that for girls, stability is the royal road. In the end I still swayed back and forth, unable to decide cleanly… It wasn’t until a once-held ideal appeared right in front of me that I suddenly understood: the reason I had been so torn was simply that I had never encountered what I truly wanted. At that moment, even as the voices of opposition grew stronger and stronger, I was unusually firm. Only then did I understand how powerful this so-called “strength of the heart” really is. No wonder so many success gurus always have it on their lips.

But fate is always unexpectedly strange. Just when you think you are about to reach the finish line, it insists on tripping you and sending you back to the start. The people around me thought I would be heartbroken again, but after going through this whole cycle, I gradually came to understand that the most important thing is inner peace, and that this should never have depended so heavily on the external environment in the first place. Once you see that, gains and losses, staying and leaving, no longer seem so important.

Back then, when Xiao Caomei talked to us about Sisyphus pushing his rock, she said that the meaning of life lies in acknowledging its meaninglessness and still insisting every day on doing what you yourself think is meaningful. Whether it is Pangu splitting open the heavens and earth or Sisyphus pushing his stone, in the end both become only legends. But for the person involved, what is real is the understanding, harvest, and growth gained within the process itself. When I was young I read Lin Qingxuan, and I vaguely remember him saying something like this: if you walk outward, the outer world will be wonderful, but it will always have an end; if you walk inward, the inner world can be infinitely wonderful. What a wonderful thing to say. It’s true that there are many interesting places I still haven’t been and many earthshaking things I still haven’t experienced, but growth has nothing to do with any of that.

As a vulgar ordinary person who has never escaped low-level tastes, I follow all kinds of gossip online every day, adore the cold jokes on Qiubai, direct and perform my own sloppy life day after day, and laugh carefree with familiar friends. I have no exceptional gifts, a poor memory, and I am always losing things and forgetting things. My emotional intelligence isn’t high; all my joy, anger, sorrow, and delight are written on my face. I have no shrewdness, no aura, not even a passing impact factor… With a foundation like this, even I find it unbelievable that I have managed to stagger along until today. I do not hope for huge influence, nor do I want to change other people or change the world. I only hope to do well the things right in front of me and pass one quiet day after another.

Teacher Xu is someone who loves thinking about life. That day he told me that happiness actually doesn’t come in sizes—the happiness of winning a ballgame and the happiness of winning a war are really the same. I couldn’t agree more. At the end of the term, when I got an email from a little student saying I was the best TA he had ever had, I quietly went crazy with joy for several days. That happiness was not the slightest bit less than if a paper of mine had been accepted. This really shows how utterly unacademic I am…

At an MS offsite, the success-themed video they played encouraged everyone to strive to become great trees rather than little grass. But from the bottom of my heart, I only want to be a blade of grass with companions scattered across the world. Isn’t it also wonderful to add a touch of dark green or yellow-brown to humanity’s computer desktop wallpapers?

As for the question at the beginning, I still haven’t found my answer. But I don’t plan to keep digging into it either. I’ll just let things take their course, like Mayday’s Open the Skylight:

When the wind is at your back, spread your wings and fly.

When it blows against you, treat it like surfing.

And when there is no wind at all, then let me open the skylight.