Is Autumn Sadness a Meaning We Made?
The last day of September. Mid-Autumn has just passed. A couple of days ago I saw a news item saying men are more likely to feel sad or low in autumn. Have I failed to notice my own feelings? I am not a melancholy man, and I have no gift for autumn grief. I cannot put the feeling into poetry.
The moon on the fifteenth: in the years I lived in Chengdu, I never saw it in a clear sky. The city’s geography got in the way. After I came to Shenzhen, I finally saw it on the night of the sixteenth — bright, lighting the dark. The photo on my phone looked fake, like staring at a tungsten filament through a cardboard tube.
At night it lit the road. On the screen it was a lamp. The same moon is whatever you take it for.
Lately I have been busy with work and with life. In short, busy staying alive.
On a break, on the way to eat, a colleague suddenly asked me what the meaning of life is. I was puzzled. Do I look like a philosopher? Why ask me?
E-bikes shot along the sidewalk. Some were delivering food, some rushing to be somewhere. Everyone looked in a hurry.
This question has been discussed since I was small. It is open. There is no fixed answer. People still hand you a ready-made set:
- Study hard, and grow up to be useful to society
- Realize your ideal, or your dream
- Live for someone, or for some cause
I thought for a while. I told my colleague: there is no meaning.
No meaning is issued to you. Admit that first, and you stop collecting the answers above, and you can make one of your own.
The one I make is concrete. Life goes against you most of the time. The effort to have a little less of that, to make a day more livable — that is the meaning I accept. I added it.
Autumn sadness is the same layer. The days get shorter, and a person can feel heavy. That weight does not have to be something you made. Calling it sadness, deciding this season ought to hurt — that is the meaning added afterward. The moon on the sixteenth can be a tungsten filament in a paper tube, or only the light on the road ahead. I did not file it under sadness.