It was 20 degrees below zero, the wind was bitterly cold, and a 17-year-old girl was carrying a 60-pound bag, walking with difficulty.
The belt of the backpack made deep marks on her shoulders, and she felt like she was being strangled to the bone.
A cold wind blew, and her body felt like it was falling apart.
Her throat was bitter and salty, and she wanted to scream but couldn't. She hadn't had a sip of hot water in 12 hours.
She was so cold and hungry and sleepy that she wanted to sit down on her butt, but once she did, she might never get up, and with her partner right behind her, she couldn't stop even if she wanted to.
She felt that every blood vessel in her body was frozen like ice, and every inch of her skin was like a wilted leaf, as if it would become fossilized and permanently lifeless in the next moment.
She did not want to endure a moment, she put down her hand holding the bag, feet on a rock, as long as the eyes closed, jumped down, the pain will disappear.
She closed her lips tightly seems to be the biggest determination, before jumping she instinctively looked around, behind a girl close to her, if she jumped, will inevitably bring the girl fell into the bottomless cliff.
She stopped and continued to endure the pain.
This is what happened in 1969 in the winter months of the day at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, the temperature in minus 20 degrees, the average altitude of 4500 meters above the Ali region, which is known as the "roof of the world", "the world's third pole", "The story is about a man who was born on the roof of the world, the third pole of the world, and the forbidden zone of life.
The main character of the story is the familiar Chinese writer Bi Shumin.
Fortunately, she did not jump, or we would not be able to read many popular works, such as "Kunlun Gothic", "Blood Linglong", "Red Prescription", "Save the Breasts", "Female Psychologist" and so on.
Today, 50 years later, she is still palpitating when she remembers that scene. In that moment, she says, a little selfishness would have gone with her heart's desire. And that would have been one of the biggest regrets of her life.
After that disaster, the whole eleven years after, Bi Shumin in this mountainous wilderness not see the green plateau above the quiet life.
She stroked the mountains again and again with a cold gaze, but never voice, sing a song to express the depression of the heart.
A less than 17-year-old girl why so pessimistic and reserved, can not see the hope of life, will go to light?
This is due to her own deep inferiority complex, and the origin of this inferiority complex is precisely one of her life, but had to face the great pain.
In the silence of the mountains of Ali, she countless times to think back to the moment that made her feel inferior and ashamed.
In the midst of the beautiful and stirring melody, Bi Shu Min and other small friends like to pull out their voices, trying to cater to the music, singing the song loudly.
Suddenly, the female teacher stopped the music in her hands and walked up to them, where she told her classmates to continue to open their mouths and sing, while she herself went back and forth watching them lip-sync.
"Bishop, I said there was always a discordant voice among the ranks, and it turns out to be you. You have been expelled." The female teacher suddenly stood in front of Bi Shumin and opened her mouth to say this.
Bi Shumin looked around at her classmates and wanted to say something, but tried to swallow it back, she packed up her things and left in a mess.
She walked aimlessly down the road, and then a girl ran up to her, "Luckily you didn't go far, the music teacher told me to call you back."
"Bi Shumin, who made you grow so big? In the future, you will continue to stand in this position, but you can only open your mouth and are not allowed to make a sound." The music teacher's cold voice poured into her eardrums.
Since then, she has fallen into a bad habit, never dare to speak in a crowded place, not to mention singing.
After 11 years of living on the plateau, she froze and let herself think quietly with her lips closed.
From the bottom of her heart, she always thought she was not qualified enough, no matter how hard she tried, she could not compare with others.
Years passed and she did not even sing a lullaby to her son, because when she tried to open her mouth to sing, she remembered the contemptuous and disgusted look of the female teacher, which was like a whip that tightened around her throat.
This inferiority complex has always been with her, that is, after she has published a lot of works, and has a high reputation, but also still have an inferiority complex.
Once, she was invited by the Hundred Schools of Thought to give a lecture, but she quickly refused for various reasons. In fact, it was her low self-esteem that prevented her from going forward: "What if I don't speak well? What if I leave a very bad impression on the audience?"
Perhaps the teacher was thinking about the effect of the whole chorus, but she didn't know how y her contemptuous look, irresponsible attitude and behavior had hurt a young girl's heart, so much so that it affected her whole life.
And this also made Bi Shumin develop a rigorous and serious personal style.
Because I know, I am compassionate.
Knowing that others are troubled and struggling after rejection and indifference, she always shows a kind smile and warms and irons the hearts of others with especially gentle words.
At the age of sixteen or seventeen, Bi Shumin was alone, silent and silent, gazing at the mountains of Ali all day long.
Above 5,000 meters above sea level, the extreme geography, snow and ice, the vastness of the universe looked down on the smallness of man.
The silence of Ali often puts her in an extreme depression of life.
She examined the meaning of life and life again and again in the depths of her heart.
When she and the old army doctor carried the body of the dead to the high mountain spread, the deformed organs exposed in the wilderness, circling overhead the giant eagle swooped down, but also slanting eyes make her shudder, the giant eagle's extreme speed of the rise and fall, almost will accidentally injure her, the death of the near at hand.
Why try to live hard when all life will die?
Ali polar life of the severe test, around the young comrades and the departure of many lives, let Bi Shu Min feel the cruelty of life, the fragility of life, she is very confused, do not know what the meaning of human life is in the end.
Pessimism is like a big mountain that has been weighing her down.
Later, Bi became a writer and went to a hospice to experience the last moment of life.
Lying on the bed where the body had just been lifted away, she remembered the moment when she wanted to die when she was young; she remembered the words an 80-year-old man said to her on his deathbed, "I feel like I've never lived before in my life"; and she remembered her old father smiling when he left and saying, "I have been very happy in my life. "
But she could not experience happiness. There was never a wave of sad pessimism within her.
Even when Bi Shumin traveled around the world, her life should have been considered a success.
But she would still habitually think of the worst point when she encountered a crisis, is it the next moment I will become the prey in the lion's mouth?
She kept this sadness to herself, she was always full of pessimism about herself, but she was willing to give others a way out in the middle of this silent pessimism, to give others a hope.
After 11 years of military life, because her son got rickets, which made her very self-blame and guilt, so she applied for quitting Ali, came to the mainland to continue to work as a doctor.
During the doctor's duty hours, she spread out a piece of paper and melted the bits and pieces of her life in Ali into Kunlun Gothic, with a woman's delicate strokes, but with a man's strong heart and vision, to examine and measure her own life, a place that she regarded as the foundation of her life.
When the editor got the manuscript, he looked at her name again and again with skepticism, not believing that it came from a woman.
But when Bi Shumin and her husband came to him, he was sure that this was the woman he was looking at, and he admired her for the strength she revealed in her subtlety, as he did in her writing.
The publication of Kunlun Gothic caused a strong sensation, and Bi Shumin seemed to be an overnight success.
However, it actually took her eight years to write the book, and the life scenes in the text are a true reflection of the most precious 20 years of her life.
In those years in Polar Ali, there were always young lives that left early, and she had already experienced the pain of parting with life and death, and she thought: life is nothing but a meaningless act.
But you read in her words, even in this meaningless, there are still so many obscure people, in order to protect the homeland, do touching noble things.
At that moment, even in the bleak life meaningless background, she is still willing to choose to let themselves and others, to feel the beauty of life, because the meaning of living, you can go to give it.
"The real world has too much sadness and joy, happiness and sadness, but when we face it bravely, we will eventually love the world, and the brave self. "
In the many years since, she has used her warm brushstrokes to weave her life experiences into rigorously dispassionate novels over and over again.
She wanted to use this deep contemplation of tortured life to inspire the public on how they can live in this world without regret.
Before his death, his father told Bi Shumin that he had no regrets about having such a daughter, and that he had lived a full life, and that he had lived a very happy life.
That moment y shocked Bi Shumin, she thought about how people live in the end to be able to go to happiness?
Is it that we are so eager to accomplish one task after another that we are numb and continue to move in a rigid manner?
Or do we really feel the tender skin of a freshly bathed baby in our arms?
Or to feel the relief that comes when we draw the last period in a novel?
So Bi wrote Reminding Happiness to let more people feel the subtle and simple moments of daily life, so that life can be lived in the present moment with great flavor and significance.
After the Wenchuan earthquake, Beichuan invited Bi Shumin to teach a language class in which children after the disaster said they were the happiest people in the world.
She asked, "Why?"
The children said, "So many people died and we are still alive, aren't we happy?
People in all the provinces of the country are eager to care for us, and ten days after the disaster, we can already start continuing our studies, aren't we the happiest people in the world?"
At that moment, Bi Shumin's mind felt a never-before-experienced shock, she thought she was teaching the children how to face the disaster, but the children taught her how to experience happiness.
Happiness is the little by little, grateful for life, to feel the moment, every moment, the breeze of this moment of tenderness and touch.
The power of the heart is so mysterious and great.
So she went to study psychology, she wanted to use more professional and deeper theoretical knowledge, to comfort more people in the swamp of the mind struggling hard.
After becoming a counselor, in the counseling cases, Bi faced a variety of troubled, wandering, struggling, entangled people, although they have tried hard enough, but there are still a lot of people can not break free from the psychological cage.
There was a case in medical history of a man who lived in a grotesque delusion that he was an omelette.
He refused to sit down for fear of breaking himself and spilling the yolk.
This is typical of the pessimist.
The doctors tried sedatives to calm his fears, but nothing helped.
Finally one doctor, in recognition of his delusions, suggested that he carry a slice of bread with him. When he sat down, he would put the bread on his chair so that he would not fall through and spill it.
From then on the patient always carried a slice of bread in his hand, but it helped him to lead a somewhat normal life.
Bi Shumin is willing to use her hands of words to give to such people, a piece of spiritual bread, to undertake their hearts have been broken yolk.
She feels that her mission in life should be to use the pen in her hand, and her lifetime experience, as well as the knowledge and theory of psychology that she has learned, to build the strongest defense system in the human heart.
This is probably the greatest value and meaning of her life.
Women Psychiatrists, written by Bi Shumin on the basis of such knowledge, is a novel about life experience, philosophical, and psychological energy, which was conceived in the most stable and mature period of her life.
In The Corolla Virus, Bi wrote that a person facing the world's toughest viruses is not how good his or her physical qualities are innately, or how advanced the medical equipment is, or how good the medicines are.
And it is precisely their own strongest confidence, and the greatest psychological energy constructed within, that is the strongest defense against all viruses.
Even as a pessimist at heart, she has always known that there is a darkness in the world, an unfathomable darkness, and a chilling presence of viruses.
But she still believes that even in the most barren soil, in the steepest cliffs, there is a kind of the most tenacious life, in the never yielding upward growth, as in the plateau of Ali, there is still a large area of the red forest will be y rooted into the earth.
It is that a rooted soil of the red forest, gave Bi Shumin a strong faith and perseverance, she patience to overcome their own kind of deep pessimistic complex.
She often laughed and said, "If you happen to come to my home, see my home is spotless, clean as a wash, to know that I have been in a kind of boundless hopelessness in the pain, I am in the use of this kind of constantly doing housework in the discharge of this negative energy."
After experiencing the harshness of the Polar Regions for a long time, Bishop has the stamina to withstand the winds and snow of life.
"It's like having chicken pox, and having antibodies to similar diseases, and from then on, general disillusionment couldn't knock me down."
She is willing to put this determination and the method of defeating decrepitude into the book, to tell more people in the trough, how to go uplift to face the storms of life, bravely step out of the comfort zone, step out of the limits of the mind, to challenge themselves.
A parent once said, "Mr. Bi, can you teach our children a way to avoid suffering?"
Bi said, "I can tell you very firmly that your children are bound to suffer from life's hardships."
"Only how to firm up our hearts and strengthen our inner strength to face suffering head on, not to run away, and to find a way to face it or solve it, can truly save us from fear and suffering."
Life is a constant climb, breaking through the heavy difficulties, nirvana rebirth, full of enthusiasm, hold on to the present, cross to the other side.
Because life is everything but death, everything is a graze.
Bi Shumin said: "Happiness is actually a kind of inner stability, we have no way to decide all the things in the outside world, but we can decide the state of their own heart. "
Each of us is an insignificant particle in the universe, as small as an ant, but each of us is a giant in our own inner world.
Although we know that life is a tragedy, we can still smile and face it, and strengthen our inner strength.
This may be the life of Bi Shumin, as well as her writings, to tell us the truth of life:
Even if we live in low self-esteem, pessimism, but we have the power and ability to look up to the stars, so we have to go all out to make themselves happy and beautiful.
. END .
Text | Fish Antelope
Editor | Daniel Lee
Typesetting | Maomao Yu
Previously recommended:
Ye Jiaying: A life of much suffering.