Last night, Tina and I talked a lot about embracing the opportunities and achievements we’ve made, cause embracing the good things in life could be easy and hard at the same time. I was really happy for her when she told me she got the chance to keep working at the high school next semester as a formal teacher, since I knew it was pretty hard and there were lots of competitors to beat over, however she made it, and to be honest, I wasn’t surprised. She’s been flexible, smart, talented and passionate about education for a long time, if the chance was not hers, who else could get it? Yet she told me that she could not post anything or tell anyone about the great news out of fear that the blessings and appreciations from others are often too hard to distinguish. “I don’t know what are the real emotions between their words.”
I know. I told her.
I think of my own experiences for the past year, as I stop posting long stories of how much I have achieved or how hard I worked (things that I did during college years) because the more I know, the more discreet I’ve become. I started to take more people into concern, but not our of fear, but out of the awareness toward the world around me, one that’s diverse, big and flowing quickly. It is a weird feeling actually, like a journey to the castle, to the dreamland, or plainly to becoming a grown-up, people climb through mountains and swim through oceans, trying very hard, but too often look at the distance till the ending instead of the roads that are already walked over. And so, sometimes I’m the former one, I compare myself to others, but other time I don’t compare, I try to be understanding, about everything. It isn’t about the definite right or wrong value among the two mindsets, but more of the mission to strike a balance between them.
Interestingly, we talked about thriving from calamity and perishing in soft living last night too, thus the conclusion may be to look into past, present and future all the time.
Also, about luck. I told Tina oftentimes when I thought about the fruits I received from the endeavors I made, I would be overwhelmed because I could not firmly stated that “yes, I deserve it.” though I don’t doubt my efforts either, I question “how could I ever be so lucky?”
I’m afraid sometimes, thinking about losing the luck when next challenge comes.
Then, if you fall, you just climb back to where you started.
Yeah, that makes sense, that’s what we always do.
We reached a consensus about being fortunate, as we went further to figure out our personality — we weren’t exceptional, we were just hard-working, and tried to climb higher one step at a time. When we are too close to the cliff, we ask for help, all the time, “and the world is kinder and stronger than I thought. people catch us. he catches us.”
Perhaps it’s about being mediocre, when the light isn’t that bright and sharp, we got courage to stumble then stand. A mediocre way. Something resonating with Mesotes, the golden mean brought up by Mencius.
Cheers to the short end of a journey and a long, long way to come.
