If You Can, Go See What's Far Away

September has arrived — the month that the poet Hai Zi once named a poem after. "The wind far beyond the faraway is farther than the faraway." Four instances of "far" in a single line — you can perhaps sense the poet's longing for distant places.

In August, which has already wandered off, I left no written record. That's because I, too, followed my inner calling and went off alone to somewhere far away. The temptations of faraway places were too many, and being inexperienced in the world, I lacked the discipline to sit down and write.

In terms of physical distance, I traveled from the central-western part of China to the east — roughly halfway across the country. I spent an afternoon and a night on an ordinary train heading east, then transferred to a high-speed rail several times faster, finally arriving at my destination on the afternoon of the second day.

Before this, when I had just lost my first job, I'd briefly visited Tibet. Though curious rain kept trying to tag along the entire way, there were a few clear moments when I managed to shake it off. In the end, I did catch a glimpse of the natural scenery that so many people yearn for, along with some exotic charm different from the inland.

That was the first time I truly understood the expression "looking at flowers while galloping past on horseback." Going somewhere in person and seeing the sights with your own eyes is certainly better than seeing photos, but it's still fleeting. Once life returns to normal, only faint memories remain that surface from time to time.

This kind of sightseeing tourism doesn't allow you to immerse yourself in the environment — or rather, your body hasn't begun to absorb anything before you're already on the way to the next destination. So I began yearning to live in an unfamiliar place for a while, to give my body more time to feel a different environment.

But a thin wallet, material desires, and various other reasons made it hard for me to stay anywhere for too long. Still, I always thought that one day, after achieving great success, I'd start my global nomadic lifestyle.

After a year of "hard work," I found myself not progressing toward success but falling further behind. Thinking it might be time for a change, I did what I mentioned at the beginning — I went to a village far away. A change of scenery might bring a change in lifestyle.

My destination was a small community in the countryside, housing about a hundred people. I chose it partly because my wallet chose it for me — it was cheap — partly because I'd genuinely grown indifferent to city life, but mostly because the people there were incredibly diverse, with so many interesting personalities.

After working for a while, it felt like every person I met was cut from the same mold, repeating the same things day after day. Everyone's life plan was identical: work hard, buy a house, get married, raise kids, retire. Everyone's daily routine was the same: go to work, spend money, play games, argue online, sleep.

This uniformity made even this atheist start to waver — maybe humans really were created by some god. Though there were exceptions, a few uniquely molded individuals hiding among the crowd, the overall picture was broadly the same. Those rare exceptions actually looked more like imperfect rejects from the divine production line.

So changing my environment, meeting a more diverse set of people — it was also a search for an antidote, a quest for evidence that God is dead.

Many people who came here said the place was like a university, and it really was. Coming from all corners to a new place, meeting all kinds of people, making some good friends. But what made it even more like university was that here, you could see people full of hope for the future, with so many things they wanted to do, not yet trained into being cogs in a machine.

I met college students who took time off just to experience life; a board game designer who couldn't afford mass production, so he drew games on cardboard and sold them online; a programmer who decided computers couldn't save the world, so he switched to writing; an entrepreneur who dropped out to start a business...

People who didn't follow society's conventional path were everywhere here. After getting to know them, I saw infinite possibilities — a certain primal feeling that had long been forgotten in some corner of my memory.

A question used to frequently flash through my mind: What is this "faraway" place I want to reach? The faraway is like tomorrow — imaginable but never reachable. In this moment, I think "faraway" can perhaps be interpreted as a kind of possibility.

Exploring and trying out your own possibilities — that's placing yourself on the road to the faraway. What else can I do? What other kinds of lives can I live? Thinking about these questions, or making changes — that's being on the journey toward the faraway.

My past self always wanted to go see the world in some distant place, yet was stubbornly set in my ways, completely unwilling to break through or expand my existing understanding. That self was starting to seem contradictory. One side craving a different world, the other unable to accept anything beyond my current understanding.

So I threw myself into a frenzy of learning — communication skills, guitar, skateboarding, cooking, getting along with people, attending all kinds of sharing sessions... The results don't matter. What matters is having tried, having given myself the chance.

It was all these temptations that kept me from updating my blog for over a month, or even touching my social media accounts. Looking back, I still love writing. And so I set off toward the faraway once more, and wrote these words.