Several years ago, I was still working in a hospital. One of the elders had a tumor in her brain and her family asked me to register. She was about fifty-eight or fifty-nine years old and had lived all her life in the small county of her hometown. She had lived with her husband for decades, but it was said that the relationship was not too good. One of her relatives owned a small store, and before she got sick, she went to help watch the store every day.
I vividly remember the day she came to the hospital, and I took her to the line and examination. Just waiting for the checkup, we were sitting side by side on a bench in the corridor, and she said to me, “You know, Keiko, I was in the store every day, just staring at the TV like this”, and she cooperated by doing a half-tilted head pose, guessing that the TV should be hanging on the wall, “Just staring at the TV all the time, it’s so boring, I’m really so bored… “Her husband was sitting next to her, as if he was listening intently, but I didn’t see the slightest change in his face caused by these words. I was a little stunned and didn’t know how to respond for a while. After the examination that day, they went straight home, and within a month, she left.
The words she spoke to me, now that I think about it, were actually more like a cry for help; she longed to be understood and for someone to give her answers. I was 25 or 26 years old at the time, and I hadn’t thought much about life, so I really couldn’t give her any better relief at that time. But from then on, until now, I often think of the words she spoke to me, of the helplessness, hopelessness and despair in her eyes when she spoke. It seemed to me that the “boredom” she described at that time was actually a sense of emptiness about the passage of time and human life. This feeling of emptiness can be so powerful that it can separate a person from reality, from everything around him or her, with no attachment. Without a rich heart to resist this great sense of emptiness, a person often becomes a “hollow person” with a normal appearance but an extremely shrunken heart. I even think for sure that it was the tumors that took her life in the end, but it was actually her emptiness.
Nowadays, when we talk about “boredom” and “emptiness But in fact, this can be a very serious philosophical proposition. In the end, this is actually a question of how we spend our time and in what way we exist. Our attention to the “hollow man” seems to focus more on young people who don’t know what they really like, but in fact thousands of hollowed-out middle-aged and elderly people have been neglected. Perhaps even more so, the hollowing out of people is not so much related to age, but is a subject that should be taken seriously throughout our lives. We are taught by our schools and society that we should try to get a certain number of points, go to a certain school, and get a certain job, but we are rarely told “and then what? After these goals are accomplished, “then what”? How to “pass” the rest of the long life?
Two days ago, I saw an interview with @ZhouYijun, who made a documentary about education in different countries. She said that when she saw 80- and 90-year-olds in a Finnish nursing home still painting happily every day, she felt that one of the roles of education should be to teach people how to keep their hearts full and not let them wither. I couldn’t agree more. I happened to take my daughter to the bookstore today and casually opened the Sherlock Holmes detective collection, and on the title page was a quote from Conan Doyle, “Life is very boring, and my whole life has been to strive not to waste it in mediocrity, and these little cases have given me what I wanted “.
Whether it’s painting, detective novels, or something else, finding the things that fill your heart and sticking to them is something we can never give up.
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