Endless Sleeplessness

I thought up a long passage with my eyes shut, yet when I really sat in front of the screen I couldn't get a single word down. I don't know when it started, but I've come to dislike the night, always longing to see the next day's sun a little earlier, like the children on Lunar New Year's Eve who can't wait for the first day. I thought if I closed my eyes and let the darkness stew this pot of porridge, I would slip away without a trace to atone, then opened my eyes again, and those dense clouds would drift apart without my noticing; and I would still be that good student who, even when falling, admires the view — a little wicked, a little foolishly bold.

A friend said: waiting for the chance yet leaving it for others; how many perfect one-percent beginnings I have lost while waiting for a hundred-percent start, and how many ninety-nine-percent lies I have fabricated, all for the sake of one after another of hundred-percent self-deception.

Enough, all this philosophy, this literary flourish... I think I've lost myself. Was I like this before? I need a fulcrum, I need to use my life to lever up something, and the tragedy is that I've been searching for twenty years and it still hasn't appeared. "You're pretty outstanding too," I tell myself, half-dreaming, half-dozing.

Tell me I can still be saved, can't I?

Everyone's life has its own unique side — some are smooth and slick, handling things with effortless grace; others are loftily proud, looking down on everything yet possessing nothing. Actually, no matter how outrageous a person acts, it's forgivable, because existence itself is reasonable. The only difference between wrong and right is your own standpoint: stand on the side of wrong, and the right becomes wrong.

All things are empty; emptiness is nature. Humans come from nature and return to nature. How small people are — if you carry gratitude in your heart and reverence in your soul, a little bird nestled close, a mountain stream softly singing, what a harmonious picture that would be. The scenes of nature are not only green trees set against red flowers, waterfalls, and spring thunder, but should also include the melancholy of yellow sands stretching endlessly with no road home, the longing of one peak ever higher than the next. As for the question of life, motion is unnecessary. Motion is a kind of destruction of life, and one might also say that motion itself is a kind of life. In my view, life is static — it is the existence of a thing at a certain moment in a certain way. For example, when I stretch out my hand, the posture of my reaching is itself life. Another example: a stone rolls to a place and stops; its stillness and the harmony with what surrounds it is also alive. Simply put, life is a given state. Try to appreciate the beauty of life — rich or monotonous, passionate or weighty. As the saying goes, only by being magnanimous can one be great. If you could embrace everything like the earth, would you still fret over some trivial little thing?

But this world really is chaotic; we rack our brains and yet can only keep ourselves safe and at peace with each other.