The wutong leaves have turned brittle in the cold, and the evening wind leaves its mark on everything. I looked at the date of my last post and realized more than two months had passed since I wrote anything. It was not that nothing worth writing had happened. Quite the opposite. A great deal had happened, but most of it was the kind of thing that does not improve with retelling. Disappointments come often; the number of people you can actually tell is small.
On the way home that night, I saw an old man on the subway with two sacks. One held a cotton quilt; the other probably clothes. It was late, and the carriage was not crowded. There were even a few empty seats. When I am not too tired, I prefer to stand. Standing gives me a wider view, and I like watching the human comedy go by.
Maybe he was worried about dirtying the seats or disturbing the people beside him. Maybe he was worried about taking up too much room. He did not sit down. He lowered himself to the floor and curled up in a corner. I looked at him and thought of my own father. When I was in high school, my father went alone to a big city to try his luck. There was hardship in those years, though he never put much of it into words. I have always avoided those memories. It is not that I have forgotten them; I simply do not dare to dwell on them.
At the terminus, the old man got off too. We had both ridden to the end. I felt a small, useless pang of fellowship, the kind that comes when strangers share the same last stop. I deliberately slowed my pace and watched him come back to himself, stand up, hoist his sacks onto his shoulder, and walk away. His clothes were dusty, his gait unsteady, but his eyes held a determination that needed no speech. The older I get, the more easily I am moved by that kind of sincerity and fearlessness.
The station was about a kilometer from where I live. There were shared bikes around, but I still preferred to walk. The road home has good sunrises and better dusks. Few people pass by, which makes it easy to empty my mind. Sometimes I practice singing there. No one minds, and I do not have to worry about being heard badly or disturbing anyone. On that road I take off whatever disguise I have been wearing all day. I become a solitary practitioner with no self left to protect.
Of course, that road is also where loneliness and confusion wait.
I see childhood friends getting married one after another. I see old classmates settling into jobs and homes. I see my parents' eyes still holding the old hope that their son will make something of himself. I see people in my field charging ahead in their careers. And I seem to sit still, as quiet as stagnant water. It is hard not to feel everything at once.
When anxiety rises like a tide, it is easy to lose my bearings and drift away from what I originally meant to do. A friend once pulled me back with a few plain words. Everyone at our stage is lost, the friend said. Everyone has doubts and pressures that are hard to explain. Maybe the times have shaped us this way. But if we reach eighty and look back at years spent in self-pity, misery, or numbness, we will regret it more than we regret today. To become a happy old person, and a happy self, we have to think about things that make us happy and do things that feel meaningful. Whatever kind of life it is, it will come.
After graduation, we rarely asked much about each other's lives. Now and then I see a glimpse on social media. Compared with a friend who is doing a PhD, my small anxieties hardly deserve mention.
Sometimes I walk along the Haihe River with friends. We ask ourselves the same question there: when there are so many choices, why did we choose a path that is both lonely and hard? We all have answers. But when restlessness blows through, a heart that is not firm enough begins to waver.
I once came across an essay by Chang Man-chuan, The World Is Different from Imagination. One passage stayed with me. She writes that she does not want us to be disappointed with the world. Rather, because people are not always kind, feeling another person's goodwill should fill us with gratitude. When we want to fly, we find wind beneath our wings. When we are tired and need to land, we hope for a warm embrace to rest in. We know our own flaws and defects, and yet someone is still willing to love and tolerate us, which gives us more courage to face the cold moments. The world is indeed different from our imagination. Because of that, we learn to cherish and to be grateful.
We live between heaven and earth, suddenly like travelers on a long journey.
I am an idealist. When a dream is desecrated or trampled on, the pain feels like a knife turning in my chest. But whenever I read a warm sentence or meet a gentle person, my heart is brushed by a spring breeze again. Slowly I begin to understand the forced sorrow of youth, the helplessness of partings and full moons, the desolation of an old fisherman alone in his boat on a cold river. Life is probably made of both surprise and letdown. People who have come from the dust are perhaps best able to understand the ache behind a loud laugh. They also know that sincerity and fearlessness are the best ways to face an imperfect life.
Watching the clear light of a sunset is not my only pastime. But the Little Prince said that when people are sad, they like to watch the sun go down. A sunset does suit the mood. On this planet, those forty-four sunsets are not mine to see. Tonight's one will have to be enough.