When I read Cao Cao’s lines — “Singing over wine, how long can a life be? Like morning dew, the days already gone are many and bitter” — something inside me jolts. The train of time rushes in and rushes out again, and our lives are fated to be as brief as dew.
Time passes like a blade, sun and moon like a shuttle. Before I knew it, I had reached the end of high school. Every sunrise gives me a strange joy; every sunset leaves a long sadness. Our lives, I think, are like that too — beautiful and short.
I still remember entering high school, naive and mischievous in ways I will probably never forget. I cried because a teacher criticized me; I swelled with pride because a teacher praised me. I laughed and made noise with classmates, and I joked with the homeroom teacher. The train carried me forward; I had no choice and reluctantly chose to grow up. I once thought three years would be long. After three years, I understood how short they were. When I saw my naivety turn into ambition, my carelessness into composure, my recklessness into anxiety over gains and losses, I suddenly understood what it means to say that years urge people old — the person ages, and the heart ages too.
Shelley said: “Compared with life, what are the rise and fall of empires and the changing of dynasties? Compared with life, what is the turning of the sun, moon, and stars?” Yes, life is short, like a song: when the tune ends, people scatter.
As a child, I liked to swear at the sky that I would repay my parents when I grew up. Now I understand that everyone is on the train of time, and no one can withstand the erosion and baptism of years. When I see my father’s body shrinking, when I notice the deepening wrinkles on my mother’s face, I know they are old. Their train runs faster. I cannot hold it back, cannot gather up the years they have lost. When black hair turns white, I understand: life cannot bear waiting; time passes far too quickly.
Jin Shengtan said: “Tens of thousands of years and months all go like water, clouds, wind, lightning — all gone — and only in this year and this month do I temporarily exist. This temporary self is also like water, clouds, wind, lightning, quickly going.” I race against time, but no matter how fast I run, I cannot win an ending that is already fixed.
When I watched Dad, Where Are We Going?, I felt like someone who had already come through it all. Wasn’t my own childhood happy and sweet in the same way? Compared with the children on the show, I appreciated it more as one of the fathers. Because childhood innocence is gone; what I have is depth. Perhaps the years gave me that unconscious choice.
Youth has passed, the best years are gone, and the train of time still hurries forward. Maybe one year, one month, one day, it will suddenly stop, and I will be forever buried in the dust of history.
Tagore once said: “Let life be beautiful like summer flowers and death like autumn leaves.” What we need is to live the present well, to hold every minute and second of life, to cherish every little thing we have, and to let the train go slower, slower...
March 28, 2014