Until now, I still have the same feeling of my childhood, the feeling when walking on the roads...
My first path was a small alley, an alley with a fence of mulberry and bright red hibiscus flowers. My father, fearing that I – a little girl of 1 or 2 years old learning to walk, would slip and fall – had packed bricks and mortar and laid them on the paths. It was only a very short distance to the village road, only about five or seven steps, but each time I walked, I felt steadfast and supported by my father’s love and protection.
The small alley welcomed me to a world larger than the house, the beautiful banks, the hibiscus flowers that were in my sight. Starting from the village road, leading to the fields, the river, the sun shining brightly from the distant horizon, the grasshoppers flying chaotically on the dike with the flickering purple color of the clover, letting me meet many villagers at dawn rushing to the fields with plows and hoes...
The road in my village was muddy and muddy in the cold and drizzly winter days. I carried sandals and walked barefoot on the mud road to go to first grade at the village temple. I touched the soil of my hometown, walked on the footprints of the villagers and the buffaloes that had gone before me. There were days when I could still feel the warmth of the people and the buffaloes that had gone before me. I always silently thanked that warmth, the warmth that helped me walk steadily, feeling my heart filled with more love and tenderness... I always thought that the people who went before me wanted to leave me a little bit of warmth...
From the village road, I walked out onto many wider roads. “This world originally had no roads, people walked forever and they became roads.” The writer Lu Xun said, I deeply understood and loved that most obvious meaning. Even though I had never heard of his saying during my childhood. But wherever I went, when I walked, I kept the habit of slowly looking at my feet, to think, I was walking on millions of footprints that had been passed. I was walking on a road that was pioneered by the first person, and hundreds of thousands of other people expanded it, made it clearer, made it a trail, a big road… I was walking through so much sweat, tears, aspirations, hopes and sometimes even despair and misery. The footprints of the suffering, the happy, the hurried, the leisurely… But they helped make my path today clearer, wider and always warmer and more confident.
Later, in life, I reflected on the story of the “path” - which once existed in me in the most naked sense - to see that all of our “paths” are stories of the “path”. There are so many paths, so many forks in the road that we choose. We reach the shore by our own choice, by our awareness, by our experience, by our awakening, by our judgment, and if possible, whether you are adventurous or wise, be the one to open your own path. But certainly, you cannot deny history, you cannot deny that the path you have taken has the footprints of pioneers. You cannot deny that the path you have had to go through, to reach today's experience, you had to stumble and pay the price...
Netizens now often use the phrase “turn around”, meaning a sharp change in perception, ideology, thinking and action. Well, turn around. You still have to return to the road you came from to return to the finish line. Or you still have to take another road to get to where you want to go, but how can you deny that you have had a period of time together or maybe with bigger roads, it is a road created by our ancestors.
So, no matter what, let's say thank you, even though tomorrow, we may each go our separate ways...
Illustration: Document
