Sometimes people are not so much resisting the future as they are used to a certain way of life and unwilling to face the unknown.
I went to middle school in China. As middle school was coming to an end, I felt no fear about the future approaching. I was getting ready to study abroad. I have forgotten exactly what feelings filled me that summer after graduation, but I am certain there was nothing negative about them. My first year of high school was online, so I had already made friends with my classmates, which made going to the United States for my second year a little less uncertain. But even if I had not known any of my classmates, I would still have looked forward to studying in the United States. I did not resist the idea.
As I was about to graduate from high school, I did not feel much resistance to going to college, either.
Now I am a junior in college, and I will graduate the year after next. Just as I am getting ready to step out into society, I have, quite uncharacteristically, begun to resist it.
I have never had a job, and I do not know what a workplace is like. I do not know whether I will work in the United States or in China. If I work in the United States, I will no longer have the chance to go home to China whenever I have time off, and I will need to find someone reliable here to cut my hair. If I go back to China, what kind of work will I find? Will the working environment there suit me? If it does not, can I change myself to fit the environment I am in? If I cannot find a job—or, rather, if I cannot find the kind of job I want and do not work—what will my life be like? Will I go to work with my parents every day, or will I stay home every day, just reading and working out, as I did this summer? Where will my friends be after graduation? If they are not in the same city as me, should I make new friends? If I am to make new friends, what will bring us together, and where should I go? Friends are hard to find, but good friendships can withstand not seeing each other. So all I ask is to have one good friend in the city where I live. That would be enough.
I feel that this resistance comes from facing the second change in my identity since I was born. The first was the change from a mischievous child to a student. The second, this one, is the change from a student to a participant in society. To think that I am in my twenties and have only been through one major change in identity gives me pause. It also offers a little comfort: I have only been through this once before, so a few problems the second time are no big deal.
Perhaps I resist the future because I enjoy the present. Look at my life now: I am in college, the campus is beautiful, the professors are good, my morning workouts feel great, my morning coffee tastes delicious, and the friends around me are kind. Above all, I have grown used to being a student. Thinking about all this, I feel I still need to remind myself to cherish the present. In high school, I missed middle school; now that I am in college, I have begun to miss high school. People say we cannot both be in a certain state and fully feel what it means to be in that state at the same time. When we are young, we do not feel how precious youth is, but we have it. Once our youth is behind us, we begin to feel its value, but we no longer have it. So, in a sense, it is when we lose something that we truly come to possess it. This may be a way of comforting ourselves, but it is indeed how things are.
I want to take this discussion a little further and make it slightly heavier. I want to talk about my parents. When they were not yet forty, I used to think they were fairly young. But as soon as they reached their forties, I suddenly felt they had grown old. There was even a time when I was afraid that the time they had left by my side was dwindling. It was only when I made comparisons that I realized that, for someone in their twenties, parents in their forties and not yet fifty are actually very young. Many of my friends’ parents are in their fifties or sixties, or even older. Thinking of this, I can probably breathe a little easier. My parents are very young.
As a student who is often far from home, I always forget about home and my parents when life is going most smoothly. Yet time and again, when I encounter setbacks and suffering, I come to realize the strength of family and the seemingly eternal support my parents give me. Time takes away many things we are reluctant to let go of, but it also gives us opportunities to accumulate beautiful memories. If time did not pass, what we love would indeed be preserved forever, but we would be unable to interact with these people or things, unable to gather all those beautiful memories in our minds. So I do still want time to pass. Only as it passes can I see how easily the people and things I cherish can decay, and only then can I learn to cherish them.
要政阳
October 17, 2026, Santa Clara