Reading, Traveling, and Love
Modern life is constantly under bombardment. With the winds of history blowing from all directions, how does one walk their own path through the chaos? Here I record my reflections from reading Professor Liang Yongan’s Reading, Traveling, and Love.
About the self — it spans multiple dimensions. There is the authentic self, shaped by all your choices throughout life. There is the imagined self, distorted and refracted through self-consciousness, not the true self. And there is the ideal self — who you believe you should be.
The process of knowing yourself is the process of finding the authentic self. First, you must understand your position on the stage of society and history, rather than drifting as an aimless creature of nature. Many people today cannot see themselves clearly because they don’t know where they stand or what value they hold. Never lock yourself in before you’ve understood the world.
In this transformative era where coordinates are lost, how should young people position themselves? To know yourself, you cannot sit indoors gazing at the sky through a well. You often need to discover yourself through imperfect exploration — through pain and joy. In pain, you discover you’re alive; in joy, you discover you’re still ordinary. Through this process, you gradually learn what kind of life you love and what kind of world you want to connect with. This is what we call the passion of youth.
In this process, solitude is a crucial link. When young, we discard many precious things, only to realize later that what we once dismissed as worthless was the most valuable. We often mistake meaningless things for treasures. Only through solitude and personal choices can we experience what is truly real.
The authentic self is certainly imperfect, but it is uniquely one’s own. Only when faced with resistance can a person be moved to reflect on whether their life is genuine. Once a person is touched by this raw force, clarity floods the heart, bringing a powerful sense of value and happiness. Once you experience this feeling, you won’t want to let it go. This joy can only be found on the road of exploration — no bitter cold, no plum blossom fragrance.
I hope our new generation can live with continuity of life as human beings — living authentically through childhood, youth, middle age, and old age, as people who live from the inside out, rather than from the outside in, living in the gaze of others.
The book also contains Professor Liang’s thoughts on character and cultivation, though I don’t entirely agree with his definition of a “good person.” The quality of one’s character shouldn’t be tied to the clarity of one’s cognition or the realization of life’s value. A simple, unenlightened, unambitious person may have a personality that genuinely radiates goodwill. Fortunately, regarding the importance of morality in character, I align with Professor Liang. As Kant said, “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence — the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
We arrive in this world by chance — what are we living for? Many people live to acquire, but how much acquisition does one truly need? Many people don’t cherish themselves, placing themselves in vanity, competition, and other relative values, thinking this will earn admiration — but what value does it ultimately hold? We may be exerting force on a chain of evil, chasing empty fame and fleeting profit, using only those around us as reference — “I want to live better than them.” This is actually an enormous devaluation of one’s own worth.
What truly has value is seeking and cherishing the self, understanding freedom in this world, treasuring the freedom of individual life, attending to your own value and the value society needs, confirming what you can do, and ultimately doing something different from everyone else — adding some light to society rather than clinging to the monotonous. Only then will we have a completely new view of life.
Finally, I’d like to share a line I love, which also reflects my current attitude toward life: “To possess the ability to accept and allow everything to happen, to share and express from the self, but not to hold fixed expectations for feedback and response.”