'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
but being too happy in thine happiness.
I have finally started the solitary life I’ve always dreamed of, beginning a greenhouse-style life as a Beijing drifter.
Prelude to Drifting in Beijing
People often change their life trajectories inadvertently, only realizing it long after the fact. What we can experience is the present moment, so let’s set aside for now what exactly the decision to take a Gap has changed. But that night was truly liberating—not because of the drinks or the food, but because of the silly English conversation with Vicious Master. It was a bit like sitting by a campfire on a cold night, cooking soup—even if you might freeze to death the next day, while warming yourself by the fire, you see the brilliant Milky Way, not the frozen wasteland.
I’ve always believed that the most sophisticated way to destroy someone is to stand in their shoes and question why they didn’t seize a good opportunity they should have grasped earlier. The key to this method is that the opportunity is now irrevocably lost, and the more precious that lost opportunity was, the more effective it is. After the person breaks down, you can shamelessly claim you did it for their own good.
But in the end, I didn’t break down. As always, I treated it as a stepping stone on my journey.
Soon after, I went off to an internship. For the first couple of days, I was completely clueless about the work I was supposed to be responsible for. I felt like a fraud, someone who knew nothing and had come just to mess things up. In the new environment, I kept wondering why I was torturing myself—wouldn’t it be better to just be a couch potato? But this pressure was beneficial; it carried a very strong sense of living. So, I quickly adapted to the new environment.
Vigilance and Learning
We often say, “One thrives in adversity and perishes in comfort.” Please note, this isn’t an essay for the college entrance exam. I realized that another phrase I particularly like carries a similar connotation:
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and learning: how to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
I love this kind of metaphor so much that sometimes my speech becomes obscure and hard to understand, using abstract yet simple symbols to express rich meanings. The advantage of this approach is that you can imbue these symbols with meaning from your own life and learn new insights from them. Reviewing the old to understand the new?
What I want to tell myself through this quote is that without clear self-awareness, if you live blindly, time will pass quickly. When the world finally rushes toward you, you’ll crash into the mountain and realize it’s all too late, giving others the chance to destroy you using the sophisticated method I described. Or perhaps, life will pass by smoothly, and you’ll become “a part of the inferno.”
So, acknowledge the risk of failure, understand its consequences, and then live each day with clarity—stay vigilant and keep learning. If all goes well, I’ll probably ask myself at every stage why I’m torturing myself, but in reality, the days will be fulfilling, and I won’t have any regrets.
Just as a very optimistic friend of mine said when summarizing his past year:
“So sometimes you don’t need to worry about the things that have not happened, just be yourself and hang in there, make sure that when the opportunity comes, you won’t let it go!”
Let’s keep going.