David's Life
Saturday, April 17, 2004
Working on a Redesign
I have been using a lot of my free time over the last two weeks developing a new design to celebrate Brightwind’s transfer over to a new hosting service and a new weblog publishing system. I struggled for a long time before finally finding something I was happy with. You can see an image of what the design will hopefully look like when it’s finished here.
Right now I’m in the processes of slowly modifying the site piece by piece so that the new design will gradually fall into place. I’ve already made some modifications, such as removing the old image behind the title, and I’ll be putting in the new one soon. Hopefully the new design will be ready in a few days. 
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Saturday, April 03, 2004
Mostly Updated
Okay, I think that the site is basically about ready. I have fixed a number of the major problems, such as broken links and so on. In the coming week, I’ll still have to upload all the old pictures and adjust the coding behind a number of old entries, but overall, this new site is pretty much ready to go.
I’ve got something of new design, and I would very much like to hear your ideas about it. It should be a little faster than the old design, because it’s lighter on images, but it’s also got more simple white space. Did you like the look of the site as it was a couple weeks ago better? Those of you outside China should be able to access the old site at this address, in case you’d like to compare. If you do prefer the old one, I think I should be able to change it back again. I’d very much like to see what you think. Please leave comments if you have an opinion.
As far as plans for the future are concerned, I plan to open a section for image galleries once the plugin for that is released by pmachine (again, for visitors outside China, the old galleries are still available). I may also open another section for stories, like storysphere on the old site.
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Thursday, April 01, 2004
First Entry on the New Site
Welcome to the future of Brightwind—on a brand new server, and with brand new software! For the time being, the site is really raw, but I got all the old entries imported alright. Now I need to work on changing the colors and the look of the site, as well as getting the pictures uploaded and so on… God willing everything will come fast. I’ll be working on it a lot over the weekend.
Monday, February 16, 2004
Your Wings
During the vacation I just spent with my mother, so many of the veils over my understanding have disappeared, and the eyes of my soul feel as if they can see more clearly. Of course, every advance in one’s own understanding reveals more clearly that vast oceans of mysteries lie beyond one’s grasp, but there are moments of joy that come with it as well, which somehow make things seem as if all is right with the world. It lasts this way for a while, until the time comes for you to pass some major new test, and acquire powers and knowledge you didn’t know you wanted. Confusion is a necessary ingredient in the stew of spiritual growth, but you never know that until the spiritual meal of the day is finished and ready to enjoy.
Anyway, one day I was talking with my mother about a number of things, many related to my early childhood, and I realized that I had gone through a large part of my life always wishing to serve others on the quest that they had rather than to take up my own. I had a feeling that I was destined to be the father of someone important, remembered as something like a footnote, treated only in the introduction of that person, as a background to their lives.
Today I can put that notion at ease more easily than before. Whatever or whoever my children, or friends, or anyone else in my heart will choose to be is very much up to them. But my choice is the one which is up to me. Each of us has only our own life to live, and a major part of that life is to take up the challenge of making one’s own special contribution to the world. No one else would ever think to do the things you can do, in the way you can do them, simply because they are not you, and they have other tasks of their own to fulfill, other potential they must unfold.
As beautiful as others are, whether they fly high above you or below, there’s no one else with those wings at your side, and there’s no one else who can fly with them.
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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.
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