The Shawshank Redemption – Perseverance in the face of adversity

What would you do if you were unjustly imprisoned, imprisoned, with no freedom, only a sentence with no end in sight, a vicious and brutal prison guard and warden, and a brutal and brutal fellow inmate? Is it to cry and rush to the ground, to wash your face with tears all day long, to confess your fate from now on, to be depressed for life, or to fight violence with violence and use more brutal words and deeds to deal with the injustice of fate? None of this was his choice, he was Andy Dufran.

　　An innocent and talented banker, Andy Dufran, is accused of killing his cheating wife. That night, he sat in the car, drank bottle after bottle of wine, filled the revolver with bullets one by one, and then opened the safety... What happened after that? Only he knew, not even himself. The cheating wife and adulterer were shot eight times, and almost everyone believed that he did it. So he was sentenced to a very dark prison, Shawshank Prison.

　　"Sir, I want to know when we can eat." One of the same inmates who entered Shawshank Prison with Andy asked such a question when questioned by the prison director, but in exchange for not the answer, but the beating of the prison guard. That night, a newcomer who could not stand the inmates' teasing was beaten to death by the prison guards who heard the noise in the midst of crying. Shawshank Prison is so dark, where there are no human rights to speak of, where the guards disregard life, the perverted hobbies of the prisoners, even if they are full of benevolence and morality, and the warden who never separates God from the Bible, is actually corrupt and bribe-oriented, trying to squeeze out all the value of the prisoners. Andy seems to have lost his freedom, but the freedom of the mind is not something that can be locked up in prison, "I just want them to know that some things, such as hope, cannot be closed by the walls of the prison," Andy said. He never gave up hope, he used his ingenuity to resolve one crisis after another, winning the respect of his fellow inmates; pretending to compromise allowed the prison guards and the prison director to obtain monetary benefits, get special attention and protection from the prison guards and the prison director, and even helped him set up a library in the prison so that the prisoners could read and gain knowledge; entrusted the friends of the prisoners to "smuggle" a pickaxe into the prison to maintain his hobby of carving stones. Just when he felt that everything was going in a good direction and that the days would go on without waves, a young new prisoner broke the silence, he witnessed everything at the time of the crime, the murderer was someone else, Andy wanted to seek justice, but how could the greedy warden allow Andy to get out of his control? So he killed the young prisoner. Andy was desperate, and he finally realized how dark and greedy these people were. But he did not admit his fate, and one day he disappeared from the prison, leaving only a large hole in the back of the poster in the cell. The inmate once said, "If you want to use this pickaxe to dig a hole to escape from prison, you're going to dig for about 600 years," but he only used it for 20 years. After his release from prison, he made the evidence in his hands public, and the corrupt prison guards and wardens were eventually brought to justice.

　　The first time I watched "The Shawshank Redemption", a movie played by a teacher in a high school English study class, I was later attracted to hide in the bed of my dorm room at night, staying up late with a flashlight to read the original novel by Stephen Edwin King. When I saw Andy enter the chaotic and dark prison in the movie, I even felt that there were only two words left in my heart, "finished", but then I was attracted by his talent and optimism, and when I saw the hole to freedom that he had dug little by little in twenty years, I was completely shocked, and I wanted to be shocked not only by me, but also by the students who were watching the film. After class, the teacher stopped me in the hallway and asked me what I had learned from Andy, I had forgotten what to say at the time, and now that I think about it, I should just insist on growing up in the face of adversity. Twenty years of digging a hole with a small hammer, what a lot of perseverance is needed, it is Andy's spirit of perseverance and not giving up, to help him finally regain his freedom. Persistence is an indescribably powerful force, just like the words of the old woman by the river to the young Li Bai in the Tang Dynasty a thousand years ago: "As long as the kung fu is deep, the iron pestle is sharpened into a needle." Successful people can never leave these two words, persistence, is the premise of success. Andy's insistence, not only the big hole, in order to persuade the state government to fund the prison library, write a letter of request a week, one is two years, the state government is overwhelmed, want to use five hundred dollars and some old books to send Andy to let him seal the pen, in exchange for a letter a week became two times a week. Many times, we lack this persistence and perseverance, such as wanting to learn English well, memorizing a few words and not getting tired of it, making all kinds of excuses for ourselves, and regretting it afterwards, so we go back and forth between shallow taste and regret. More often, we have to convince ourselves that we must control ourselves, to enhance self-control, the road to success must be full of thorns, perhaps ups and downs, or perhaps just boring, but in such adversity also insist on growing, is the only way to succeed, in retrospect, will also feel proud.

　　"You're either busy living or you're busy dying." May we all be like Andy, in the persistence to achieve transformation and counterattack, in the adversity can also be optimistic and positive to fly against the wind, continue to grow.