I overheard a video of a speech by Professor Liu Qing, a professor and doctoral supervisor of East China Normal University, "We met on the first day of the rest of our lives and talked about the meaning of ordinary life".
The presentation begins with five questions. First, the more you learn, the more you realize the emptiness of the world, life is like a dream, and the challenges are real and concrete. In such a world, how should we exist in such a small world? Second, there is time to feel that you can overturn the world, and sometimes soberly aware of your own ordinariness and boundaries, can you always maintain a kind of "naïve bravery"? Third, what allows us to achieve inner certainty and peace? Fourth, why do many people understand a lot of truths and still live this life badly? Fifth, the harder you work, the more tired you are, and you don't know if the direction is right, how to understand the meaning of effort? These problems have one thing in common, which is that they are confused, anxious, and directionless about their lives.
Professor Liu Qing said, if you let me give the answer, find a clear sense of certainty, find the meaning of life. All I can say is that I don't know. Then he added that this was Socrates' answer: I know nothing about the great questions. Then Professor Liu Qing said a loud and clear sentence - no one is a mentor when it comes to exploring the meaning of life.
What I deeply understand is that the life goals of the vast majority of people summarized by Professor Liu Qing are to earn money, and the second is to make more money. At this point, there was a buzz of laughter and applause from the audience.
Most people's concept of money is vague. All we know is that with money, we have everything. The most familiar saying is that money is not omnipotent, but without money, it is impossible. Each of us treks the road to earning money, even from the age when we weren't even in school. All the education we see is not how to cultivate a person who loves to respect life and knows how to enjoy life, but how to forge them into a tool to earn money. And Professor Liu Qing revealed that the only purpose of making more money is that we need to prove our worth by seeing the reflection of other people's eyes. Because everyone needs recognition from others, admiration from others, respect from others. This mode of thinking makes our lives a competitive game, or even a battlefield.
Professor Liu Qing did not completely deny the meaning of competition, he just called on the other side of competition to everyone - we will look at the world around us in a completely utilitarian way, including the natural world, including people.
However, life is never won or lost. In the simplest terms, is it necessarily a win to be alive? But in any way you can make your life disappear from this world, it's a complete loss.
At the lecture, Professor Liu Qing told several stories, two of which are still fresh in people's memories, one is the story of a real person, and the other is the story of a movie.
The story of the real person comes from a friend of Li's birthday. This friend of Li Tian's had a private plane, and when he saw his plane and the two planes of a certain country prince parked on the same tarmac, he felt the disillusionment of life, and Li Shi's friend said that my plane was like a toy in front of those two planes.
The story of the film is an Iranian film called "The Taste of Cherries". A middle-aged man, before committing suicide under a cherry tree, wanted to taste the last of the cherries, but he felt that he had never eaten a delicacy he had ever eaten. The taste of cherries reawakens him to all the good things about the world. The middle-aged man gave up suicide just because of a small cherry, and which lush cherry tree.
As Professor Liu Qing said, everyone is born with a pair of baby eyes, but as people grow up, there is no longer a virgin heart in that gaze. As adults and as parents, we are quietly and mercilessly taking away our children's most precious wealth day by day.
What is the meaning of life? It may not be possible to say, but he is open to us in a rich guise. Outside of that battlefield, each of us has a garden of the heart, where there are flowers and fruits that belong to each of us. Maybe we didn't have a chance to savor them before, so let's start now. Because every day is the first day of the rest of our lives. Every ordinary life has extraordinary meaning.
