About fading traditions or unfinished walls

(Baonghean) - When some of my niece's friends came to visit, I tried to talk to them to find out which boy my niece liked:

- Do you work or go to school?

- Yes, I work in Hanoi, at bank X.

- Are your parents still working or retired?

- My parents run business Y here!

Talking to the kids, almost all of them are struggling to find a place in big cities, even though their parents here have built a decent foundation if they are private enterprises and a more or less influential position if they work in the state apparatus. When I asked why they didn't take over their father's business, one boy shook his head with a resolute expression: "I want to be self-reliant. I don't want people to say I'm a freeloader." Another boy declared that he didn't want to work at the Z Department of the province, just because "he was afraid that people would gossip about him."

I suddenly feel sad and sorry for young people who blindly pursue the so-called "self-reliance", "walking on their own two feet". Those thoughts are not wrong, they even show that they know how to think, know how to respect themselves, know how to live responsibly towards themselves and society. But it is necessary to clearly distinguish between relying on others and seizing the opportunities that others give you. In fact, the above mentality is understandable when young people often have high self-esteem and desire to assert themselves. But if you look a little further, you will see that what people give you is not ready-made success but a shorter path so that your time and talent are not wasted, or even stunted. That path, in the end, you still have to walk it yourself, who will walk it for you?

So while you stubbornly “explore” new paths from zero, the path that your parents spent their whole lives building suddenly becomes a dead end. In many countries, there are professions and occupations that are inherited from generation to generation, becoming the symbol and soul of an entire family, and then naturally becoming the name and surname that the children and grandchildren carry with them forever.

Names like Xavier “Apple and Cotton Tree”, Pierre “Sacred Sword”, Jordan “Blooming Fields”,… are simply the karma associated with their ancestors that their descendants have preserved and developed to this day with gratitude and pride. This also explains the enduring vitality and strong expansion over time of many businesses and companies. It is not only the result of the labor of a generation, it is the crystallization of knowledge and experience of many generations, inheriting the old and absorbing the new, connecting the flow of yesterday with the youthful spring of today.

Talking about the decline of many famous professions and occupations in our country during the generational transition, it can be seen as a kind of brain drain. Brain drain here is the result of labor, experience and knowledge left by our ancestors. The things that previous generations had to exchange with sweat and tears are eventually poured into the vortex of time, while the younger generation keeps spinning around in the same place on the bamboo boat. Let's call this a waste, more than that, a disrespect and indifference to what the previous generation inherited.

Ultimately, what each individual, each family, each society wants to build is a wall of success - happiness - civilization. Inheriting and promoting tradition is to build a higher wall. Being indifferent and forgetting what has been is to build a new wall parallel to the old wall. And so, we build a maze where our ideals and desires to touch the sky are forever imprisoned.

Hai Trieu