Sincere and upright: probably the best posture for an embrace.

2017.05

This year's May rain is a sticky, cloying thing. There is nothing you can do about it, and yet you can't bring yourself to scold it. The temperature, pushed back down every time it lifts its head, has given Nanjing a long spring, which is rare here. But everything is itching to move, long since ready for high summer, so the gift gets a little in the way. It's like a yawn stopped halfway: there you are, belly out and arms stretched, unable to go forward or back, looking a bit awkward.

Here the Chinese quotes three lines from Faye Wong's song "Ambiguous" (暧昧, words by Lin Xi), on a love left in half-light and a parting that never quite happens. They are on the Chinese version of this page and are not translated here.

It is simply an ambiguous season, and for me an ambiguous year. Almost without noticing, I am coming again to the point where two stretches of road meet. I imagine countless branches of the future, but the future can only collapse, bit by bit over time, into what is real. Until then it exists as a probability cloud, flickering on and off in my dreams. The flickering creates motion, and motion tends to bring rich meaning. The painful and the happy, I taste them all, deeply and keenly.

Thanks to all the time that has passed, I am finally learning to take the initiative. I can't always let the world change me; I should also act on the world. That is the relationship between life and its environment anyway: they influence each other and depend on each other.

I also want to become more real, little by little, to try to make the world's AT Fields a little thinner. I am just me, no bigger than the real me and no smaller. I hope that what I say is what I think, that I make the choices I really want to make, am honest with myself and sincere with others, though that is very, very hard, because outside forces keep driving you into all sorts of odd corners, and so you may end up "turning into the kind of person you once hated most".

But if you haven't tried, how do you know you can't? If I don't reach out towards the unknown, how can I touch the boundary between me and the world? Without analysis, how can I know the structure of things? (That sounds a bit like empiricism, haha.) Just as I would never have known that I could walk alone, on a rainy afternoon, from school to Jiangjun Mountain and come back with some vivid joys and regrets, until a few days ago I actually did it. The road so glossy in the rain it mirrored the two rows of green, the birdsong rising and falling, the damp, fresh air, the hollow echo in the arched tunnel, so much, so much. It reminded me of a line I read recently:

The vast flow of information carries less information, and less feeling, than what your soles take in when you walk barefoot on a gravel path.

And then of something I once wrote myself:

If you don't embrace the world, how can the world embrace you?

2013.05