Love
Friday, December 31, 2004
The Bright Wind Blows...
My time in America has been fulfilling and good for me, but I've been learning that it's not the place I need to be right now. On one hand, coming back here was like a kick in the face, while on the other, it was like a sweet honey.
For a long time, I had been planning to spend a long time in China - maybe my whole life - learning about the Chinese, living among them, becoming friends with them, and sharing my life with them. This has always exhilarated me -- from every word I breathed in the Chinese language, to every night I spent in a Chinese bed, I knew that my life was growing and expanding in ways I could not predict.
But some things tempted me to come back to America, and to find out if maybe it wouldn't be better for me to stay here for a while. Suffice it to say that even though I always intended to go back to China, I considered being here for a year or so. Then, those temptations which had lured me here suddenly became unhealthy for me and they left me wondering what I should do. I felt ashamed that I had even left China in the first place, when it had been such a great home for me and held so much promise, and I thought maybe I needed to stay here for a while, just in order to become worthy of going back.
But things don't work that way. Worthiness doesn't come from outward measurements: degrees from western universities, or years of experience in some profession. Somehow I realized that if I'm going to be worthy to go back to China, I have to embrace the worthiness I was born with.
You see, I know so many people there in China, who are to me like stars shining in the sky of humility and friendliness. I hear some foreigners complain about problems they have with Chinese people, but somehow I think that they live in a different China from the one I have known for 4 years. Truly, the Chinese friends I am blessed with make me feel awed. They are so different from me, and yet, in every way that counts, not different at all. None of these dear people ever looked at me and thought I was not worthy.
For me, the word I made up for this website, "brightwind," has taken on a real meaning. It is that mysterious wind which blows you where you need to be in life. It may blow you onto a certain path, then off it, then on it again, but all the time it is blowing you in the right direction. It is the force behind "Yuan Fen," as the Chinese love to call it -- the way people come into your life just when you need them, and the way you come into their lives, just when they need you.
This brightwind whispered in my ear that China was not waiting for me to be worthy. The reality was something else. When you hear the brightwind calling you, soothing your heart, you can't really put into words the message you hear. But suddenly, it makes you feel warm and content with your life as it is, with the plans as they were before you tried to fix them -- unbroken, whole, and worthy.
I hold in my hands a plane ticket to Nanjing, arriving February 26. (Happy New Year)
China • David's Life • Love • (21) Trackbacks • Permalink
Monday, January 12, 2004
Pandora's Hope
In a previous entry, I wrote about how rare it is that someone really finds “true love” in this world. For a long time, I had cherished the idea that I might be able to create a truly happy and successful family, but after some disappointing experiences, I began to believe that I had failed. I seemed to be, like so many other people, condemned to live my life in solitude, or at best, in a pale shadow of my impossibly idealistic dream.
My dear mother took issue with that. In an email, she wrote to me:
Minor criticism: I wished that the article on marriage would have been more upbeat. There are some good things about being single.
At first, I wanted to respond to her that I didn’t feel upbeat about marriage at the time I wrote that article, and how could I have written something that I didn’t feel? But then I started to think that my negative attitude was the fruit of a belief that, for whatever reason, I was chosen to suffer in this life, to have my dreams dashed to the ground instead of fulfilled. It seemed impossible that things could have happened as they did if this were not true.
But then I happened upon a very special film in a local DVD store, and it started to make me think again, about the great stories that people have always told and remembered through the ages. How many of them ended with the hero realizing that he was simply chosen to fail and suffer in this life? How many of them allowed our hopes to die? Nearly each story which lasts in our hearts is a Pandora’s Box of turns and disasters, most of them far worse than anything I have known. And in so many of them, the main characters feel exactly the same things that I have felt, and for a moment, they too lose sight of what dreams they know are still worth holding on to.
In the end, that may be the purpose of stories—all of them must contain tension and conflict, or else our hearts will not acknowledge them as true or interesting. Our very lives are about resolving the tensions and conflicts we detest so much, and we require that a story bring out in us a new knowledge or a new faith in our power to be the heroes that our lives require us to be.
Because, while the characters of our favorite stories may be up against all the forces of evil combined, their journeys are just reflections of our own, blown up bigger for us to understand and relate to in a new way. Might it not be heroic to keep on believing in the possibility of love and happy family life—while at the same time appreciating the beauty of being single? In some ways, we are always alone—in our secret thoughts, and in the dreams that even we forget upon waking in the morning. Yet in so many ways, it is only through the others, whom we dare to allow into our lives and hearts, that we learn to make sense of who we are, and come to understand what being alone in a healthy way really means.
We began the journey of life at our mothers’ breasts, drinking on the milk of dependence. Slowly, we have learned to be individuals. And yet we must transcend even that independence in order to become interdependent on those whom we love. In that glorious adventure of relying on others as well as ourselves, hope is indeed a most valuable thing.
Tuesday, December 09, 2003
Worth a Thousand Happy Romances
Many people have advice for me about love. Another teacher who works in my school confided in me one day, telling me how she loved a young man in high school once, but since there was so much pressure for her to focus on her studies, she said nothing to him about her feelings. Later on, she married a different man, and buried in her heart a question that has stayed alive all these years, always asking her what would have happened if she had told that young man about her feelings while she had the chance. She urged me to follow my heart, and when I love a woman, to let her know that I love her.
I confessed to my friend that this might not be a good time for me to talk about my own love story. The last time I actually sat down and told someone any details of my love stories over the last two years, I discovered hot coals of anger hiding in those memories, and the very act of breathing my tale flamed them into a small rage, furious with God for allowing such a string of bad luck to have come to pass. In some cases, my luck has been so bad, so tinged with irony and impossible coincidences, that it seems it could only have happened with the hand of heaven controlling it behind the scenes, purposefully arranging for David’s heart to be crushed several times in a row.
Now this is the part where my good friends tell me, “now David, don’t be so pessimistic. Those girls were not right for you. Surely there’s someone out there, and God just is helping you get ready for her.”
I appreciate their sentiments, and I want to believe them, but then I look around at the world and I wonder: 9 times out of 10, I see people married to someone they are not in love with, often still in love with someone they are not married to. Human lives overflow with regret.
Now the statistician in me gets to work, and starts calculating the odds that David Bowers, resident of Wuxi, China and author of the Brightwind website, will ever meet that mystery Miss Wonderful. He doesn’t think long before looking at me in the mirror over the rims of his glasses and saying, “Don’t get your hopes up.”
“You’d better get used to just being yourself” that face in the mirror tells me, “because you can never guarantee that any other person will ever make you happy.”
Yet good possibilities are always there, waiting in little bubbles to just pop over your head and drop something wonderful into your life. Every day, beautiful things happen, little miracles with heavenly signatures all over them, and yet many conveniently ignore them in determined self-pity.
But that’s where those impossible coincidences come in. You can see heavenly signatures on the bad things as well as the good when you realize how far most things are out of your control. Limitations are part of the very fabric we are made of, like a ray of light which can go on forever in one direction, but never in two at once.
To realize this is to admit that the joy of life is not in the happily-ever-after fairy tale we’ve been taught to believe. We so often expect that some great event or accomplishment will “make us truly happy” only to realize that we are still the same person after the big day has come and gone.
Some things don’t really matter then: perhaps you are reading this article as a happily married person, or perhaps you are struggling through every day of your marriage just to keep on going. Perhaps you have just fallen deeply in love with someone, or perhaps you have just been deeply hurt. Either way, you are yourself, and the one person that can never go away is you.
Our little rays of light speeding through the dark vacuum of time are limited in every way but one: straight ahead. Our bodies will eventually fall apart just as they were gradually put together, yet we will not fall apart with them. These rays of light, which we are, cannot be divided into pieces, analyzed or decomposed.
Indeed, we can only shine brighter, and we will always find our greatest joy in shining, as brilliantly as the sun, on whoever we are given to shine upon. A single act of genuine kindness is worth a thousand happy romances.
What do you think? If you have something to say on the subject (and I imagine you do), please leave a comment below.
David's Life • Love • Way of Life • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
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