The night at Yuquan, even on New Year's Eve, is just this quiet.
2020 passed too fast, too fast, leaving me overwhelmed. I still remember the night I last went home: my father drove to the train station to pick me up, and my mother bought discounted cake and burgers. On the way, they were asking how my second-year final results were—naturally I said they hadn't come out yet, etc.—but in fact, my careless course selection had already cast the die for a mistake. Even with more explanation, what good would it do!
Then came the sudden epidemic, the postponed start of school, online classes, returning to school under quarantine, living alone in the dormitory for three months and more. Then there was the relocation, then the new "elderly" life. All happened too quickly. In a daze, the year-end arrived again. This morning I booked my train ticket home; if no emergencies arise, the life ahead is foreseeable.
When I was in kindergarten I deeply loved a teacher, and proactively helped her move tables, only to accidentally have a fingernail crushed off; at my grandfather's house I'd touch this and feel that, and got my finger pierced through by a stapler; when classmates ran past in the hallway, I couldn't help sticking out my leg to trip them; even when restaurants were unbearably noisy, I would still pull out my homework and wait for praise... From childhood to now, I've had a kind of touch-everything, untamed rebellious complex. But later, having accepted environmental pressures, I came to care more and more about others' evaluations, more and more to second-guess others' feelings, more and more to lose my self-awareness, to lose my own voice. Adhering to these invisible yet ubiquitous etiquette norms, my personality was gradually distorted, gradually assimilated, and the sad thing is I didn't know it. Even sadder, even with self-knowledge, I could only smile bitterly and choose to step aside, choose to ossify, choose to inherit.
What does one live for? Perhaps there is no meaning at all to begin with. In the rest of eternity there must be no soul; the so-called self-awareness is nothing more than an "existence" less than dust in the vast universe. What's more important is to live as oneself. For a long time I've been looking outward and rarely inward. On my desktop, QQ, DingTalk, and WeChat all sit silent—inside is the world of others—and there are also two or three traces of mine. Modern technology, you can say it's convenient, and it is convenient; you can say it's laughable, and it really is laughable. Cold data can portray a living human being, and personalities of a thousand differences are reduced before big data to a paltry few categories. Open them, and the world rushes at you; choose to ignore, and it drifts away with the wind.
This kind of thinking also makes one lazy, accommodating, drifting along, like a walking corpse. It's easy to indulge in empty pleasures, satisfying brief joys while also bringing long-lasting pain—planning everything out clearly, only to accomplish one or two parts in ten, halting halfway. Who is making choices for oneself? For whom is oneself making choices? Thinking about it, I'll leave these lines, hammered out by the body, for more souls to ponder.
On growth. Human growth has never been the multiplication and differentiation of the body, but the trend toward peace in thought, action, and reason, toward getting along harmoniously with oneself. For a long time, in writing essays, I dared not call my parents "father" and "mother", but now I feel there's nothing wrong with it. I can't say it's love, can't say it's respect; just that my temperament has changed, that's all. Whenever I see others' strange word choices and sentences, strange writing styles, deliberate rhetoric, a sense of awkwardness wells up unbidden from the depths of my heart; yet now, using such affected and ornate phrases to express my own feelings, I feel nothing wrong with it. Can't say it's pretentious, can't say it's overblown; just an attempt to dialogue with truth, that's all.
On friends. There's really no need to love every person around you, nor is there any need to deliberately curry favor and flatter. Others have their own life trajectories, and in their world I am mostly just a busy NPC, a nameless passerby. The thing this world lacks the least is people, and it doesn't lack good people either. There's no need to incessantly share everything about yourself, your whereabouts, your likes, your dislikes... Others may not actually care. Even if they listen with relish, it usually just goes in one ear and out the other, or becomes a joke for after-dinner chat. Save your energy for those people deep in your heart, those who reach out a helping hand in times of distress.
On fate. Fate—wonderful beyond words, isn't it?
On the self. Sometimes I think I might be just a moth, fancying that I've embraced the light I love, when in fact I'm just walking toward self-destruction. The world is mostly like this: born plainly and unremarkably or amid clamor of gongs and drums, dying mediocrely or magnificently—all just walking toward destruction. Only after withering can there be new blooming—provided one can survive until the blooming season.
I don't want to say any flowery boasts, nor any social pleasantries playing along with the occasion. The dull but prevalent formalism can no longer constrain me. Thoughts are flowing, free will is surging, while on the surface there's still a pool of dead water, calm and unruffled.
Goodbye 2020, hello 2021. In the new year, go embrace the new light.