Yesterday in the Northampton train station I bought a copy of the latest National Geographic, which is a special issue centered on China today. In at least one article, the author is reminiscing about the China he knew of 1996, and how much it has changed.
During a big corporate meeting yesterday I also happened to have mentioned the fact that I lived in China, in Shanghai, in 1987/88. It was a tumultuous year,and one of the things that happened was an epidemic of Hepatitis A, which hit 1,000,000 in a city of 12,000,000, before hitting me. I spent 12 days in a hospital recuperating from a mild case (many people get Hep A and get over it, thinking they had some bad bout of flu). Unlike B, it leaves your system and you are not contagious and can’t contract it ever again.
This last summer we returned to China for the first time since, and I finally hit all the big inland tourist sites during a two week tour with a group of Chinese Americans. And of course China had changed, Shanghai was unrecognizable for the most part, but as for me I felt that the underlying aspects of China hadn’t changed at all.
Last night I went to sleep thinking not just about China, but about all the other things I have experienced in my lifetime, and I felt pretty stuffed, like I had done a huge amount of living for someone my age. I’ve lived at some huge extremes, been exposed to sides of life that one human being doesn’t normally see. And I guess that’s good, and now that I think about it, it gives me a sense of richness.
On the other hand, I can’t help wonder if all of this will ever lead to something, or if it even should. Maybe that ‘leading to something’ feeling comes out of some essential sense of poverty, or perhaps a failure to fully grasp the true meaning of mortality.
But it would be nice to think that all of these varied experiences will some day be applied somewhere that really matters, and where all of those experiences will have been necessary to accomplish a task at hand.
On the other hand, the vast majority of human beings live with little thought other than living a decent, comfortable life, and then retiring, perhaps seeing some grandkids or something. And with my conscious mind I recognize that that is a far more balanced way to feel about life. So there are parts of me too that have embraced those timeless moments where there is no expectation or need from the future, and where the activity you are engaged in seeks no end other than itself.