I probably have never been this lost, and yet this free!
At this moment, I am getting myself complete lost in a small Suzhou bookshop 's cafe. Sitting next to long floor-to-ceiling windows, outside, everything from lush trees, pink cherry blossoms to grey buildings and passing passengers all merge in to shades and shades of cold rain. Drops of perl-shaped dark bluish rain hit the ground hard, shattering in to puddles of water - shapeless, formless, delusional, dirty and directionless. The raindrops mirror my mood perfectly. A lost body and soul.
This morning, everything went well - my meditation worked, and Doctor Agusto and saint Rita came to heal me -not until it's time to get a cab. It took me at least 30 minutes to get one.
Once entering the bookshop, I felt free and desperate to find my life's meaning from countless of books in the shop. No answer!
As many people believe, reading and drinking alcohol or taking drugs are not that different: they all help a person to pass some useless and wasted time.
Reading is not as holly as some book lovers claim it to be.
Now I understand reading books and playing computer games are not that different - they are addictive in the same way. People read books to escape from their old and predictable lives!
The strange thing though is that I was reading history books ( Harvard Chinese History)this morning . For the first time, I kind of become interested in history because I want to know my place in it! Living a short life and being dead in the infinite river of the world's history, I want and need to leave some legacies in history and this world.
I want to find my meaning.
After finishing the book within an hour, I shockingly realize that traveling around the world could have never been possible had I lived just 40 years ago, and China never opened its gate to foreign cultures not until the late Qin Dynasty.
From Qing to Qin, the majorities couldn't read!
English didin't exisit in China for 4500+ years!
Just a few thousand years ago, low-rank people must be sacrificed/ killed and buried into their ceased masters' graves to show their loyalties.
Just a few hundred years ago, few Chinese experienced any cultural diversity in their whole life time. Ru, Zen and Tao philosophy dominated their worldview and religious beliefs. Cultural, political, sexual and literature liberation were unheard of!
After reading more than one history books about China, I realize that for the first time in history, modern Chinese are accessing strange, if not crazy terms, like " creativity," " independence, and " freedom."
No wonder I was not creative and independent and critical as a child!
No soil and platform are there for them to sprout.
Even if I couldn't find any sense of meaning in my life, living in the 21st century with peace alone, is incredible! It's meaningful already!