Time really has passed quite quickly. Every year at this time, on this night, I think about writing something, and feel I should write something. But when I actually start, I no longer know how to put pen to paper.
It's also time to properly reflect on what I have gained and lost over the past days—or, in a more interesting phrasing, time to wait for my exhausted soul to catch up. Examining myself at this moment, instead, gives rise to a strange sense of estrangement. I want to say something, but I always feel that what I say isn't quite beautiful enough, isn't quite smooth enough, like the screech of a fingernail across a blackboard.
When did I lose the ability to perceive things subtly? It might have been from the moment I stopped reading literature and stopped producing meaningful written work. The once-flowering brush may now be covered in mottled rust, and writing has become a thing where I have to squeeze something out, pile up some words. Is it self-consolation? Or is it for some illusory sense of existence or ritual?
In the past year, I've been alive—just merely alive. Body and spirit have grown out of sync; every move is governed by instinct, and each day seems to be a repetition of yesterday. The various things I experienced—deputy company commander in 2021's military training, securing graduate admission—looked like such big deals at the time, but looking back now, they don't seem like much. Perhaps the day-after-day lab life now has erased the sounds and lights from those memories.
The outward life looks proper and presentable, but the inner world seems already in shambles. Cognitive space has been cut into seven or eight pieces by countless information fragments; independent thinking and self-criticism have been polluted by the muddy torrent of news media. Too much mental energy goes to small matters that have nothing whatsoever to do with me, passing time amid the illusory and the boring, like consuming spiritual opium. Truly this should not be.
Speaking of which, it really is laughable, how I waste the time I should be putting to good use, every day so peacefully. The plans are always so thorough, those grand ambitions—what kind of self do they sketch out? Are they expectations of myself? Or is it that, once a plan is set, that already counts as having accomplished the vast majority? In the end, isn't it that I still don't finish, due to laziness, and put it off to the next day? Has that person who used to be "as punctual as a machine" gone never to return?
In the end, it's still the problem of weak willpower, of relaxing my demands on myself day by day, getting by, drifting aimlessly, lacking planning, and lacking execution. The daily reflections and monthly summaries I once stuck with have become intermittent, and now even my workday reports are incomplete—truly this should not be. If you think of something, go do it; better leave yourself some time to think.
But still, I should remain grateful to the past. The friends whose life trajectories are entwined or crossed with mine, the most marvelous encounters and the most painful partings, the longest dark nights and the warmest dawns—these are bonds worth recalling now and again with a faint smile. Those eager journeys to Hong Kong and Yuquan, those bright eyes shining like stars, the thoughts that ten thousand words could not exhaust—these too will forever be frozen in memory.
This year, I seem to have come to see myself ever more clearly, and at the same time to take myself ever more lightly. Gradually it becomes harder to articulate my own thoughts, harder to express my own emotions; I always end conversations with words that blurt out, as if trying to evade lengthy exchanges, as if I've come to view interpersonal interactions as superficial pleasantries and obligations. Perhaps the older one gets, the harder it is to find friends with whom one can empathize? So one can only watch from afar—truly "to be appreciated from a distance and not approached too closely".
There have also been many attempts I'd never made before, and many things hard to put into words that I've talked through. I can accept myself, but I also hope to make changes. I don't need others' criticism, nor do I need others' sympathy and pity. The more I communicate, the more I realize that with some people one cannot show one's complete self; one should keep an appropriate social distance, otherwise it will be like two hedgehogs, just hurting each other.
In 2021, did I live as the true self? Or did I, as before, repeat the past stories and live the way others wanted me to?
In the coming 2022, let me continue to ponder.