My second autumn in Hong Kong has arrived. Yet the heat of the morning sun coming through two layers of curtains, the green all the way along outside the bus window, the sky, the two smells the wind carries by the sea at night, the crowds of Wan Chai and Causeway Bay, and the typhoons that come wave after wave only to brush past, all give the illusion of being in early summer. Still, the real autumn cannot be far off. Last year I wrote a short passage, meant to grow into a piece but set aside:
Autumn on the heat island arrives suddenly, after the fallen leaves have covered the ground about three times. You have only just got used to being drenched in sweat on the way every day and frozen indoors, and it catches you off guard again. But the weather is like your mood: when you get near one end, you should trust that it will in time move towards the other, and so there is nothing to be surprised about.
That's right. Spring, summer, autumn and winter: on this planet the turning of the four seasons is the most natural thing there is. Each is ordinary, and each can be a mating season for animals. Yet people always like to give the ordinary an extraordinary meaning, and so the sounds of the seasons acquire smells, the smells acquire colours, the colours acquire sounds; colour, sound and smell all become clues, time begins to flow between the seasons, and everything has a beginning and an end.
There is nothing momentous about beginnings and endings. It is only imagining thunder where there is no sound: imagining a beginning in which all things are about to be born, imagining an ending in which the water falls and the stones are laid bare, imagining change, imagining past and future, imagining drama and suddenness, imagining surpassing and being surpassed.
Only the present is forgotten.
The present is such an easy concept to overlook. Whenever you become aware of it, the present is already another present. The present is boring, the present is still, the present cannot be controlled, the present has no length, so it cannot give rise to change and carries no information at all; the present is lonely. And yet we exist only in the present. What exists in the next present is the next us; we can't even say goodbye to ourselves in this one.
If the present is so illusory, why bring it up? Probably because of the joy, from nowhere, that rises in my heart when I do. Like the splendour of rain suddenly pouring down while you wait in line for the bus, like the tremor a single stair sends through the whole body, like a ray of golden evening light, like the soft fragrance of tea as it enters the chest, like a whirlpool that never stops turning.
In this joy you feel that what really can't be controlled is the past and the future: one has lost its possibilities, the other has countless possibilities. Better that at this moment you close your eyes and put down every certainty, good and bad. In fact this instant is the most dramatic of all.
If we meet in every present, then even if the seasons ran backwards, there would be nothing to be surprised about.
2016.10