April 4th#
Time flies, and Qingming Festival has arrived in the blink of an eye.
Du Mu's famous poem "Qingming" is always heard during this time in my childhood. Sometimes I would be caught and asked to recite this poem.
During the Qingming season, the weather is fine, the grass is long, and the peach blossoms and willows are green. There is no more cold and withered winter, and the earth is clean and clear. It is a time for spring outings and enjoying the scenery, and tomb-sweeping is just one part of it. Why be so sad about it?
The Song Dynasty's "Broad Records of the Seasons" records: "Qingming means that things are clean and clear." The "Hundred Questions on the Seasons" states: "All things grow at this time, all clean and clear, hence it is called Qingming." There is also a saying in agricultural proverbs, "Before and after Qingming, plant melons and beans," and "Planting trees and forests, nothing beats Qingming."
Therefore, I still prefer Yan Shu's "Breaking the Enemy's Formation • Spring Scenery."
When the swallows arrive, the pear blossoms fall after Qingming. The pond is covered with green moss, with three or four dots, and under the leaves, there are one or two sounds of orioles. The day is long, and the flying catkins are light.
The clever smile of the girl next door, meeting on the mulberry path. I wonder why the dream was so good last night, it turns out that I won the grass fight this morning. Laughter arises from both faces.
How wonderful, it has the taste of Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther," where "which young man is not passionate, which young girl does not yearn for spring." This is the scenery of spring.
That being said, I am still unwilling to go out for an outing. It's not that I don't want to, but in China, I don't enjoy going out during holidays. Everywhere is crowded, and you have to queue for shopping, eating, and even going to the bathroom. When I was in New Zealand, I was willing to go out on sunny holidays. Just go to a park, take a walk on the green grass, and enjoy the blue sky and white clouds.
Speaking of the large number of people in China, I remember an interesting story. When I first arrived at a homestay abroad, on the first day when I went to school, the hostess gave me a hug and told me to be prepared because there were many people in the city center where the school was located. After I got on the bus, it was only a few stops before all the seats were taken, and later there were even people standing. I told the hostess when I got home in the evening, and she probably forgot that I came from China. The number of people I saw in the city center today was not as many as the number of people at my previous school.
China has rich tourism resources, and if planned and developed seriously, tourism can drive the development of many industries. What a pity.
April 5th#
As soon as the holiday started, I started organizing my note library. I added at least one tag to all the notes in Heptabase to facilitate management. However, I still haven't solved the problem of note accumulation, which has troubled me for many years. I have tried many methods, including spaced repetition, but the effect is not significant.
In the TiddlyWiki note library, I only reduced the number of isolated notes. However, there was an unexpected gain. My current value system actually took shape around 2022.
In 2022, living at that time didn't feel like anything was wrong, but looking back now, it was very painful. We had to take nucleic acid tests every day at that time. Zeze and I would get up early every day to catch the first wave of queues, and then go back home to sleep. Later, because the surrounding areas were successively locked down, we would gamble and go to different nucleic acid testing points like guerrillas. It was not a good memory.
We were extremely cautious, but we finally didn't get infected during the strict lockdown period, but shortly after the control was lifted at the end of the year, we both received achievement cards.
I have never seriously reviewed the notes from 2022, and this unexpected discovery surprised me. Although I have always been aware of the transformation of my values during that year, I didn't expect that I had thought so much and so deeply about certain things at that time.
Two weeks ago, when I saw that Mouse Uncle had written an article titled "[Talking about My 'Values']" (https://coolshell.cn/articles/19085.html), advocating for striving to improve oneself, doing valuable things, and making life choices, I felt that although his words were correct, they sounded like "chicken soup" in the current context.
What a person's values become is closely related to the background of the times they are in. Similarly, what kind of person one becomes is also related to the times. Many of us often think that the achievements we have made are entirely the result of our own hard work, but we completely forget that everything a person possesses is a product of the times.
If we brought Einstein to China, would he still achieve such great success?
April 6th#
I had originally booked a flight back to Beijing tonight to stay for a few days and take care of some things. But I didn't expect to receive a notification early in the morning that the flight was canceled due to severe weather.
As I was looking at the text message, a thunderous thunder sounded outside. I quickly put down my phone, curled up, and nestled into Zeze's arms.
I don't know why I'm afraid of thunder. Whenever there is thunder, I get scared, and if it keeps thundering, I start trembling all over. I'm already in my thirties, and it's really embarrassing.
During thunderstorms, I also feel a bit dizzy, with a circle formed by the temples on both sides of my head, and I feel it in that circle. The doctor didn't give a clear explanation, vaguely attributing it to my sensitivity to changes in air pressure. However, as a person who loves hiking, I have never felt sensitive to changes in air pressure.
Today, the wind and rain were raging, and there was a foggy mist covering the outside with extremely low visibility. It gave me a sense of the end of the world.
The frequency of extreme weather events is increasing, and humanity is finally beginning to swallow the bitter fruit of the past two to three hundred years of extravagance. Last summer was already difficult to bear, and this year is likely to be even hotter and more enduring than last summer.
I am most afraid of hot weather. When the weather is cold, I can just wear more clothes. Put on thermal clothing, cotton-padded jacket, down jacket, military coat, and it won't be that cold, right? But when the weather is hot, even if I strip naked, it's still hot.
There are some absurd poems, and Bai Juyi wrote quite a few of them. One of them goes like this:
Everyone rushes to escape the summer heat, only the Zen master doesn't leave his room; it's not that the Zen room is not hot, but when a person's mind is calm, their body feels cool.
The idiom "a calm mind feels cool" comes from here. Why is it absurd? The Zen master doesn't leave his room because the Zen room is well-ventilated and naturally cooler than outside. Only a fool would go out and suffer. Put him under the sun and see if he can still shamelessly say, "a calm mind feels cool."
I'll stop writing here and pack my luggage.