The cold of the previous year, the first three days of the lockdown in Wuhan, arrived as promised. The cold wind did not stop people from the footsteps of the New Year, and the streets and alleys were full of strong New Year's flavor. Don't you know that a sudden disaster has quietly arrived? As if cursed by the gods, the new coronavirus that broke out in Wuhan spread rapidly across the country like a plague. For a time, the city's buses stopped, and all restaurants and entertainment venues were closed. The community where the residents live has also implemented closed management. The whole city fell silent, and the whole country entered a state of silence in an instant. Huainan in the epidemic is quiet, quiet is not at all like a Spring Festival, just like an old man who has experienced a major event, cut his hands and wanders in the empty city, in a quiet day, the non-quiet thoughts are like an elf, flapping heavy wings, wandering in the city...
Growing up so big, for the first time, I experienced such a grand and quiet scene. For the first time, I also looked for the definition of quietness from textbooks. What is "quiet"? From a video of "The Origin of Life", I learned that from the universe that was chaotic and opened four billion years ago, to the sea with simple life, the heavens and the earth were originally mixed together, and life was reduced to one. It is the initiation of the Creator, the tide of the sea, that shoots the seeds of life on the beach and extends to the vast earth, and there are traces of life on the earth. Many years later, people still wonder philosophically why the universe is still so quiet today, why only humans are dancing alone on the whole planet. In fact, it is the richness and quietness of the sea that give birth to the colorful world.
An inexplicable new coronavirus has brought the good wishes people have longed for for the New Year to zero. Negative emotions, decadent demeanor, suspicious eyes wandered in the cold weather, the soul seemed to fall into the cold world, and a helpless lament was heard in people's hearts. At this time, the human state of mind is highly integrated with the cold of nature, as a literati said, it is cold. The cold only sees the essence, there is no hope, there is no way back, the world is not black and white, everything is not dead or alive, there is no ambiguous zone, it is the great cold.
The heavens and the earth were quiet, and there was no hustle and bustle on the streets, only the wind on the ground could be heard whistling. The snow all over the mountains has melted, and there are still patches of snow on the mountain land, houses, and leaves. Nature, just as the New Year comes, creates a quiet in this range. The first thing people wake up is to turn on their phones and keep an eye on the trend of the epidemic, so much so that they forget that the plum blossoms in the courtyard next to them have bloomed silently in the snow.
Quiet, originally is the highest laurel of human civilization, and artificial quiet is terrible, there are very few people in the world who are suddenly not alarmed, most people are still worried in the face of sudden silence, this kind of quiet and people's imagination of quiet, is the opposite, people yearn for the quiet that has been missing for a long time.
The process of life is not only a landscape with long winds and thousands of miles and thousands of meteorological conditions, but also more like fragments that have gone through the vicissitudes of eternity. Nowadays, we are in a materialistic, floating dream society, the pursuit of wealth, the pursuit of fame and wealth has become the mainstream, quiet this elegant thing, but has become a foil for the fallen literati, for a period of time, they have been snubbed and ignored by the mainstream of society.
Today, the harm of a new coronavirus from Wuhan has once again led human understanding to the road of rational return. People are eager to experience the new coronavirus, the development of society may be healthier and purer. Quiet may once again find the nobility of the past, I have always believed that liveliness is the nature of a person, a society at a certain stage, and quiet is the inevitable pursuit of a person after a society has reached a state. In 2005, in the West, I flew to Paris, Europe, on the night of Christmas, and I thought that the european festival should be full of fire trees and honeysuckles, Santa Claus and Christmas parties. Unexpectedly, in the evening of the Champs Elysées in Paris, there is no longer the usual bustle, the whole street is quiet, the mythical story of the red-nosed Rudolf reindeer in the Bible, early to follow the footsteps of adults on vacation and stay in the children's dreams. When I came to Northern Europe again in the summer, what I heard in my ears was the tour guide's tireless introduction to the history of the pirate nation hundreds of years ago, and everything I saw in my eyes was pure, even the air was full of tranquil smell, one after another wooden houses painted with rust red, dotted on the emerald green slopes near the water, a huge cruise ship slowly passed through the alpine canyon, and today in Northern Europe, people deeply understand the phrase "heroes do not ask for a way out" that is often heard. The so-called aristocratic temperament of Europe actually comes from the vicissitudes of the years, from the vicissitudes of the world, and from the nirvana that generations have struggled for.
In the mountains and ancient temples far away from the city, in the deserted wilderness, in places where there is no language to communicate, there is no one to accompany them, and the quiet at this time becomes a kind of loneliness, and those who can persevere are upgraded to saints. It is easy for people to see through the red dust in their lives, but it is difficult to endure loneliness. Ordinary people are discouraged from loneliness. There are only a very few people whose souls can wander in solitude, and whose thoughts can be sublimated in solitude. A thousand-year-old saying, "Love is lonely in the depths", is a nearly perfect interpretation of it. Of course, in my understanding, if quiet can exist in the hustle and bustle and is different from the deep mountains and old forests, in fact, it is the most ideal place in the hearts of mortals. Shanghai is lively in my eyes, but there is an elegant and quiet Wukang Road with a strong European style and traditional Chinese style. A few feet away from Wukang Road, there is another lilac garden left by Li Hongzhang for his concubine. The Lilac Garden occupies only 26,700 square meters. The most famous building on Shanghai Beach, which integrates Western style with Jiangnan gardens, has beautiful scenery and is named after the many cloves planted in the garden. Green grass, pavilions, small bridges and flowing water, red-roofed villas are scattered, so there is an enviable resting place in the bustle.
Quiet in the eyes of readers, is a fast pure land, a state of mind, a temperament. The material world is full of hustle and bustle, noise, impetuosity, and irresistible materialism. If you want to maintain spiritual tranquility, you must always keep your state of mind in an ethereal state. The more tranquil and ethereal the state of mind, the more able it is to withstand the temptations of desire in the material world. On the contrary, if you can't be empty-minded, even if you escape to the deep mountains and empty valleys, you will be troubled. Only when the depths of the soul are filled with "emptiness" will everything seem so peaceful, peaceful, detached, and beautiful where we look.
Quiet, in essence, stems from the material well-off and stops at the poverty of life. The word "poverty" cannot be understood simply as "poverty." It is a spirit, a realm, a pure and simple life. For the poor, quiet is just a hypothesis of extravagance. Just like Western philosophy in people's eyes, it was originally a kind of spiritual breakfast at a higher level of Westerners, which was not only the need of material development to a certain extent, but also the inevitable progress of spiritual progress to a certain stage. As our ancestors said, "The barn is solid and knows the etiquette, and the food and clothing are enough to know the honor and disgrace." Quiet also stops at the rich and the rich, and quiet is the miserliness of the rich and the noble. Human life is limited, and if your mind has been filled with worldly benefits, where is there leisure and leisure time to enjoy quiet? Where else to find a pure spiritual home? The standard of a well-off society is that today's society is the most suitable for being a hotbed of quiet. Under the well-off, there is more quiet in the world, and the life of great wealth and nobility has added endless troubles.
The ultimate goal of quiet is to wait. What is waiting? Waiting is a kind of expectation in people's hearts. In fact, people's lives are waiting, from small to large, from winter to spring, from the crossroads of life to the call of fate, who is not living in waiting? Nowadays, in the face of the fierce Wuhan new coronavirus, people are waiting for the emergence of the inflection point to fight the new coronavirus, people believe that there is still a heavenly reason in this world, God is still partial to human beings, and since she can lift human beings high in the dust, she will not easily give up human beings. When humanity accidentally opens Pandora's box, in addition to releasing viruses and disasters for mankind, it also brings more intelligence and hope to people's future.
Waiting is always with excitement, it is always coming, and it can be obtained after all. Therefore, in the sonorous gong and drum sound of people's hearts, waiting has become a most wonderful enjoyment, waiting for various tastes, and a more warm understanding: we wait for the first cry of the baby coming out of the delivery room, we wait for the children to finish school from far and near, we wait for the children to put on the college entrance examination, we wait for the children to successfully announce the good news on the road to entrepreneurship, we wait for the third generation of grandchildren to land. A lifetime of concern, a lifetime of hope, a lifetime of waiting! Isn't winter waiting for spring with mountains and flowers? Without waiting, where is life?
The Great Cold is the season when the vitality of the earth is lurking and everything is hidden, and a "Tibetan" word has soaked into many health care methods that have been passed down to this day. The great cold is also a season of special diligence and care for crops, and a "diligent" word yearns for hope for the coming year. All in all, it's a quiet season and a season of waiting. In the face of the new coronavirus outbreak, all we need is to wait quietly. Maybe after the cold, we will see the big view, as we think - the late spring will definitely come!
Life needs to be quiet, but the sudden silence of the Year of the Rat has left countless people speechless. If, in today's thinking, we must ask a question that has not yet been determined, who opened Pandora's box? Who is responsible for the spread of the virus today? Will there be thousands of bats flaunting kite-like wings to swoop down from dark corners and ask humans who it has offended? The "quietness" of the Year of the Rat forces people to think deeply, and this suffocating silence is still not to be desired.
Tianshan, January 20, 2022, was revised in Dahan.