Yesterday, sitting by Yan Lake and feeling a few signs of spring, I didn't realize how long it had been since I last did something like this. And not far off there was a crossroads, where we waited for each other, quiet and a little anxious.
It has been more than four months, a whole winter, since I last wrote down whatever was on my mind. I often wonder how time goes by so fast; there isn't much of a day when I'm clear-headed, clearly knowing what I'm doing and what I want to do. This morning seems no different in substance from yesterday morning: the sky lights up as usual, the road below fills with roaring traffic as usual, hunger arrives in its usual order. But the calendar marked "such-and-such a day, 2014" will never be torn off in my head again. The dates taken from me will never belong to me again. Thinking it over, "as usual" only means life hasn't had any great upheavals, but it often gives us an illusion we use to fool ourselves. Only the dying truly understand this: "In your eyes, after tonight comes tomorrow, after tomorrow night comes the day after, and the sun rises again every day. All I have is now." Life is like a huge inheritance, almost stolen, with the most deceptively splendid figures, encouraging us to squander it freely. We think money is renewable, because the value it stands for can be created. But the value each person can create directly is actually limited, because the time an individual has is non-renewable and limited. When my time is used up, nothing of mine can be renewed. So all I can do is make every minute a little more valuable, and push forward hard.
I keep moving away. Away from people I know, away from things I've done, away from places I've lived. Getting to know more people worth knowing, doing more things I haven't done, going to more places. For a while I mistakenly thought I'd grown mature enough to take every change calmly; now I find that the price of this calm is gradually losing my feeling for everything alive. Over these few years I've grown more and more infatuated with abstract, formal, logical problems, stripping the flesh and colour from the real world to explore the "principle" hidden behind it; being a cold observer, observing everything that happens, and observing myself; leaving group after group, entering group after group, and leaving again.
Draw near, understand, then move away.
I feel fuller and fuller, and at the same time emptier and emptier. Either I've taken the wrong road, or that state of rounded, complete emptiness and independence doesn't actually exist. But if I don't keep moving away and seeing more, I won't have a better chance of seeing the destination I'm hoping for.
I know that after all these years I've become a very stubborn person. I do take on other people's ideas, but unless I've finally figured something out for myself, I won't do it. Once I've decided to do it, I may feel it's a pity, but I won't truly regret it. I don't deny anything in my past; I acknowledge my own continuity through time. I'm no longer so afraid of the consequences each choice might bring, because I'm gradually beginning to trust myself, to believe that even if I'm thrown into a strange blank, as long as the system is still open, as long as the world still allows negative entropy to exist, allows the basic elements my existence needs to exist, I can still go forward on my own.
Choose the present, and you move away from the past; choose the future, and you move away from the present. And the past, exactly as it was, will not reappear in the present; the present, exactly as it is, will not reappear in the future.
Perhaps no road, no choice, can bring anyone absolute happiness. Where there are different joys, there are different pains. Bumpy or smooth, simple or winding, you can walk only one road, because these are the rules of the game the universe, as far as I know it, has given me.
So I will keep moving away.
2014.01