What is death? When I was a child, I thought that after a person dies, they will be "reincarnated" and go to another place. This week, I read "Thoughts on Life Philosophy" and had new thoughts. Does a person come from a place, and is death just a way for people to return from this world? "Death is not a return to the sea, but a return to each individual's source.
Today, I want to start this article with a little story: a mother tells her child that his deceased father has become a star in the sky, shining on them forever. This semester, we did an activity in our psychology class. We were randomly assigned several cards with words written on them, such as "lost," "fulfilled," "happy." The teacher told us, "If these words represent your high school life, what would your feelings be?" She shared with us that one student drew the word "death." In our class, this word was treated as a joke, and whoever drew it was considered unlucky. But that student didn't see it that way. He believed that death represents rebirth, that the old must go for the new to come. When he shared his viewpoint, everyone fell silent, according to our psychology teacher.
Death does not necessarily mean the end, but rather a new beginning. If a dense forest does not experience a forest fire, the saplings growing underneath will never receive sunlight. "A thousand sails pass by the side of a sunken ship, and in front of a sick tree, a myriad of trees bloom in spring." From a micro perspective, the fall of a star often brings sadness; but from a macro perspective, the sky is still as brilliant as ever.
Speaking of failure, I want to tell another story: in the first year of junior high school, our biology teacher asked us to grow bean sprouts during the National Day holiday and record the growth of the bean sprouts every day. When we returned from the holiday, only one student had prepared a PowerPoint presentation. However, the biology teacher discovered that the pictures in the presentation were not taken by the student himself (there were watermarks). The student explained, "The growth of the bean sprouts was not ideal, so I found some pictures on the internet and used them." The biology teacher told us, "Falsifying data is something to be avoided in scientific research. If an experiment fails, you must summarize the reasons for the failure."
If an explorer has to choose between two branches of a river, and he chooses the left branch, only to find a dead end ahead, can we say that he has failed? I believe he would not consider his choice a mistake, nor would he feel any guilt or regret - he knows that every "wrong" is providing him with direction to find the "right".
As stated in the "Guidebook for Research-based Learning in the First Year of High School"
We often say "failure is the mother of success." Without the previous thousand failures, there would not be the 1001st success. Our Chinese teacher said, "Hardship is the norm, and happiness is precious." By analogy, failure is the norm, and success is precious. If we are not brave enough to face failure and become discouraged at the first setback, then what chance do we have to embrace success?
At the opening ceremony of Tsinghua University, the speech given by representative teacher Mei Ciqi was not about success, but about failure. In his view, compared to success, failure allows us to see the limits of our abilities, the scenery beyond winning or losing, and the world beyond ourselves.
Failure can bring us more possibilities, and death gives meaning to life. I once read a story in my elementary school Chinese textbook: a father asked his son, who was good at math, to solve a problem. The problem was about a train, how many people got off at the first station, how many people got on at the second station... His son calculated diligently, but in the end, he asked an unexpected question - "How many stations did the train pass through?" The meaning of life is often not about winning or losing at each station, but about the scenery and the people and things along the way. When we measure a person's life, we don't just consider how much money they have earned.
In our class, we discuss death and how to prolong life. Besides using modern medicine to extend the length of life, we also have the breadth and depth of life. We should seize the present moment, challenge ourselves to do things we have never done before, and discover things we never thought we could do. Let me end with the words of our Chinese teacher.
"If you do something seriously, you will encounter different scenery."