Ruminative Moments
Yesterday afternoon after having done some reading and making notes while listening to the target learning program, my friend and I went to the near park for a
walk. It was a bit sultry and stuffy inside, but balmily mild and relaxingly warm outside. The air was comfortably soothing as well.
As usual, the park was interspersed with groups of people. We decided to sit on
the viridescent lawn for a while, where people were relatively quiet and few. I
mentioned to my friend that I had dreamed of my hometown quite a lot lately. If
dreams are as Freud said wish-fulfillments, I must have lingered about my hometown a lot without my conscious knowing of it. My friend kept appearing in my dreams as well, I guess I must have cared about him a lot.
I also told my friend that I had never been as happy as I was at the moment. The
happiness was not triggered by a single event or a special moment, it was overall a state of mind. I was happy with what I was doing now and with that my critical mind finally rested at ease. To this, I remember when I was in school, how often I felt uncertain, and even panic occasionally, about what I was about to do
when I graduated.
It was true I won some temporary peace by never ceasing to look for the answer
. But the process of seeking around itself was irritating and even frustrating:
it is like you were put in the dark, you got naturally bewildered and vexed by the long, blind darkness ahead of you, even though somewhat you knew the first beam of dawn light would gleam in your eyeshot eventually.
But now I finally passed through that stage. Maybe what I am doing is beyond
my then perception, for it is new, and it is far different from I had expected.
But overall it suffices to my current requirement for and definition of what my
life should be. In Robert Forest’s poem The Road Not Taken, the poet named out
the two different roads he might choose years ago, and what he finally went for—
the dedication to poetry, made all the difference.
So maybe I should hereafter divert from the pointless assumption that how my life would be if I had chosen something different. Our life isn’t and shouldn’t be full of assumptions. If it has to have something to fill in, it should be filled in with our bodacious courage followed by our insistent endeavors. It is saidwe are what we choose to be, so at any moment of our life I should take the lead
to shoulder the obligation and took my word for it.
I told my friend that I admired him a lot and my laudation wasn’t supposed to be exaggeration. Born in a country stressing individuality, my friend has many good qualities that people here lack of such as insistence, initiative, and creativity. Being with him, I was also encouraged that basically nothing was impossible to a willing heart. Most things are really not as hard as we imagine once we dare to give them a try.
There is a saying: if you believe yourself to be capable of doing something, it’
s true; and if you believe yourself not to be capable of doing it, it is also true. Sounds controversial, huh? But it’s true. At times if we think we are not up to something yet, maybe we just owe ourselves some more faith. Adding which or
not will make all the difference...