To Exhaust Oneself in the Doing: A Winter Meditation

Today, a biting chill has descended, and amidst this freezing cold, the city is beginning to settle into the silence of the year’s end. As I reflected on the myriad events of this past year, contemplating what constituted my most significant realizations and pondering my comportment for the years to come, I arrived, quite suddenly, at a singular truth.

It is this: one must never superimpose one’s own life upon “the Other”—be it society, the government, or even one’s own family. No matter where we dwell, we moderns inhabit a world prone to breeding dissatisfaction. Indeed, seeing so many fall into circumstances where even basic livelihood is precarious, we possess a habit of assuming that the only comprehensive solution to such discontent lies in transforming that which is external—the Other, the family, society, the government, the world itself.

However, as I have continued my speculations since the latter half of this year, I realized—around autumn, in fact—that “transforming oneself is the first principle, and the transformation of the Other is, in truth, of little consequence.” For several months since then, I have deepened this thought from multiple angles, retracing the paths of our predecessors to see how they historically engaged with this problem and how, upon that basis, they lived their lives. Spending my days in this manner, I began to harbor a peculiar sensation I had rarely felt before.

It is the sensation that, regardless of the condition of society or the world, by gazing firmly at oneself, erecting an internal axis, settling the heart within one’s own dominion, and sharpening a state of unshakeable stability, it becomes possible to fulfill precisely what one must do each day, entirely unswayed by the tremors of the Other. Furthermore, I understood through visceral experience that by creating this state oneself, one can spend days that are quiet yet pierced through with heat, carefully and without the stress or dissatisfaction that is otherwise unavoidable in the modern age. Above all, I feel that creativity exists not merely for making works of art, but rather that one’s sensibility is tested most rigorously in the creation of one’s own life.

What is interesting is that, when considered calmly, this seems a matter of course. Indeed, the superior predecessors of all times and places—East and West—mostly arrived at answers close to this, as can be divined from their words. That is precisely why it seems so crucial to note that while history appears to develop in its outer appearance, when viewed from the aspect of the spirit, it has not developed at all. Even if the human population increases or the technologies of civilization shift, when viewed from the perspective of the individual human spirit, we are not growing; rather, the forces of regression are overwhelmingly dominant. Moreover, surprisingly, this regression possesses a mysterious inverse momentum: it grows larger with the passage of eras. That is to say, as generations pass, the human being drifts further away from being human.