When I was young — younger than now — I didn't believe in dialectics at all. The idea that fortune and misfortune are interdependent? Pure sophistry. And that story about the old man at the border who lost his horse — the reversals of fortune in it are entirely contingent, which strips the story of any persuasive power. But after thirty, and especially in the past few months, I've grown fond of a particular phrase: This is the good side of all the bad things. This is the good side of all the bad things.
Take a car accident, for example. When I was driving back to Beijing during Spring Festival, I got into one. Here's how it happened: I was driving through the snowy night in a daze (though I didn't think so at the time), and I crashed into a van. The airbag deployed. I was fine; the car needed major repairs. By any normal measure, this was a bad thing. But I never, not for a single second, saw it as bad: I was grateful to be alive. Grateful that the accident stopped me, and that I survived. I not only survived — I walked away without a scratch. Could anything be more fortunate, more good than that? Some might say: at best, you got lucky within your misfortune. Wouldn't the best outcome be no misfortune at all? If I were a bit younger, I'd think that way too. But the world doesn't work like that. The world is full of misfortune, just as car accidents are a matter of probability. That night, I was enveloped in potential misfortune. If this smaller accident hadn't stopped me, I might have had a much worse one — and then I wouldn't be writing these words. Perhaps that night would have passed without incident, but then I wouldn't drive as cautiously as I do now, making future misfortune far more likely. Some might say: I'm already cautious without needing an accident to teach me. I admire you and wish you well. But true caution comes from true danger. Without ever having faced danger, one can never be truly cautious. This is the good side of all bad things: the bad thing stops you here, preventing you from facing even greater risk. On another level, why do bad things happen? To a large extent, you deserve it. In the ultimate sense, people deserve everything — in this world of arising, abiding, decaying, and dissolving, anything can happen. Practically speaking, bad things always carry some share of one's own responsibility, one's own causes. Driving carelessly is the cause of a car accident. To look inward — that is the only way of thinking that truly serves your own interests.
On another front — take breakups, whether professional or romantic. A breakup is certainly unpleasant, but it has its merits: it ends what was bad, allowing things to move in a better direction. Of course, staying together has its benefits too, but those benefits also contain genuine downsides — for instance, they keep you from realizing that you had this option all along. You always have options, and having options is itself the benefit. Life has its ups and downs, good and bad, perhaps brief, perhaps prolonged. But whether good or bad, all of it arises from deep causes. You must sow seeds to reap fruit. Taking action matters more than anything. Ending a bad fruit is itself a good seed. Go forth, face the truth of things thoroughly — that alone is good enough. As Mencius said: To stir the heart and toughen the nature is to gain what one could not before. Stir the heart and toughen the nature — only then can one gain what was previously beyond reach. The finest application of this saying I've encountered concerns that Nobel laureate from Beijing Normal University. When he passed away, someone said of him: in the final chapter of his life, he stirred his heart and toughened his nature, and gained what he could not before. A person is not born as the person they become. It is experience that transforms someone into who they are. This is the better way of looking at what has happened — this is what we call being "forged."