How should a person live his life without shame?
Someone quoted this passage to answer this question:
This passage comes from Zhu Guangqian, a famous mainland aesthetician and educator, and March 6 is the anniversary of his 35th death. This master once talked about reading, making friends, reasoning, and beauty in his works... It brings a lot of inspiration to readers, especially young readers.
When talking about the huge proposition of "being a man", he said: There are only two difficult things to be a man...
"The Two Hardest Things To Do"
(Excerpt) Author/Zhu Guangqian
Speaking of which, there are only two difficult things to do as a person, one is how to deal with others, and the other is how to deal with oneself. In the final analysis, this is only one thing, the most difficult thing is to deal with yourself, because you know how to deal with yourself, you know how to deal with others, and you are still at the end of your life.
It is not easy to deal with oneself, because there is an ambiguity in dealing with oneself, and on the one hand, one cannot be without self-esteem, one must not be selfless, and one must not be without personality. On the other hand, he must not have arrogance and arrogance, must not cling to himself, and must not let his selfish prejudices dominate. In short, he thinks that he should not be too small, but he should not be too big, and the difficulty is in the adjustment arrangement, just right.
It is not easy to deal with oneself, because it is not easy to know, just as the powerful cannot lift oneself up, and the eyes cannot see themselves.
Truly self-aware people are rare. "Knowing people is philosophy", self-knowledge may be a matter above philosophy.
The ancient adage "Know yourself" is therefore called the crystallization of the highest wisdom of the Greeks.
But "know yourself" is not easy to talk about! People often "do what they like", and the one who is good is themselves. Self-esteem is high, and if others don't see it so high, our self-esteem will suffer a big blow. This kind of problem is in others, we immediately see it, and in ourselves, we turn a blind eye.
There is a story in Greek mythology. A beautiful young boy, Narcissus (also translated as "Narcissus"), envied his own beauty, often crouched on the well railing to look down at his own shadow in the water, and the more he looked at it, the more he loved, he jumped down and embraced the shadow, so he fell into the well and drowned. We all have a bit of "Naxisi disease", often because we love to see our own shadow falling into a deep well without knowing it.
Looking in the mirror is a good thing, and we often advise people who don't know it: "You go and look in the mirror!" But this advice is not clever, he looks at it, it is still his own shadow, like Naxisi, the more he looks at it, the more complacent he becomes, and the more his true face is blurred for himself.
His best mirror is the world, the kind of people who are his kind. He recognizes the world, recognizes human nature, and naturally recognizes himself, and self-knowledge requires deep intellectual experience.
Confucius said, "I have knowledge, but I am ignorant." He told the disciples, "To know is to know, not to know is to not know, is to know." The so-called "unknown knowledge" is to know that there is an infinite world beyond the small world that you see.
This realization is true humility.
Modesty is not deliberately self-deprecating, as a courtesy, it is based on self-knowledge, knowing that what you know is very small compared to what the world knows, and the unknown world expands with the known world, and the farther you go forward to find the farther the sky. He found that the universe was boundless and bottomless, and he could not fail to feel the sense of sublime majesty, and when he looked back at his own smallness, he could not fail to feel humble.
A person must have a high vision, "know that the sky is high and the earth is thick" in order to be truly modest, people who do not know the sky is high and thick always feel that they are great, and if the sea has never looked at the ocean, they think that "the beauty of the world is all in themselves".
Modesty is a philosophy of life. "When people have no profits to be gained, they can no longer accommodate and benefit from their own profits. Humility is to know the inadequacy, to know the inadequacy and then to be able to strengthen oneself. All natural rhythms are one volt at a time. Bow desire to relax first, rise to jump first squat, modesty is the preparation for enterprising.
In the foresight of the seer. "I" can shrink to infinity or be infinitely large. When they place the "I" in infinity, they see the dignity of human nature; when they shrink the "me" to infinity, they see that human nature is very small in their own ego. The combination of these two understandings leads to true humility.
Source: text/excerpt from the author's article "Talking about Modesty" Picture/Visual China (Copyright belongs to the original author)
Editor: Yang Shufang
Recommended for night reading in previous periods
If you like it, poke it