Many years ago, there was a stretch of time when I often felt like an invisible hand was quietly pushing me toward the end. The thought of dying wasn’t violent. It wasn’t dramatic. It came and went like the tide—silent, cold, and constant. It didn’t crash. It just soaked everything in me in ice.
Back then, I didn’t understand why people kept saying, “hang in there.” I didn’t even know what “getting through it” was supposed to mean. Most of the time, it didn’t feel like endurance. It just felt like being passively alive, lost, and hollow. Like Shi Tiesheng sitting in the Temple of Earth—watching sunlight shift across stone, watching the leaves fall one by one. He wasn’t resisting anything. He wasn’t waiting for anything. He was just sitting.
And I was the same. Sitting.
Going nowhere. Waiting for the pain to pass on its own.
I didn’t truly understand I and the Temple of Earth until the wind in my life had already quieted. It’s not the kind of book that makes you cry immediately. It leaves a quiet impact that follows you long after you’ve closed it.
It doesn’t scream about suffering—it speaks of it like an old, slow conversation with fate.
You don’t bleed when you read it.
But when you put it down, it walks with you. Like a shadow. Or a healed scar.
I used to think that pain had to be spoken, heard, acknowledged to have meaning. But that’s not how Shi Tiesheng wrote.
He didn’t shout.
He simply recorded his days—sitting in the wind, thinking under fallen leaves.
Those quiet passages taught me something:
The real weight of suffering isn’t in what happened to you. It’s in whether you can eventually turn those experiences into a kind of gentle understanding, instead of a sharp accusation.
Later on, I also learned to sit with my own version of the Temple of Earth.
I stopped trying to fight it.
Stopped trying to escape it.
Sometimes I just sat, and remembered the nights I almost forgot. Like rewatching an old play I once performed in.
And I realized—
Surviving itself is a kind of victory.
But more importantly, it’s about not losing your trust in people, or the warmth of the world, in the process.
Sometimes I think growing up isn’t about gaining anything.
It’s about finally having the strength to look softly at the things we once hated.
I used to hate fate, hate people, hate myself.
But now, when I look back, it all feels like wind—passing through me, leaving marks, carrying away old weights.
Those days when I wanted to die—they never really left me.
They just sank to the bottom layer of my life.
They live now in the way I speak, the way I write, the way I look at others.
I no longer need to scream my pain.
I’m no longer afraid of silence.
Because I’ve come to know:
There is light in silence, too.
And there are answers.
Life is strange.
So are books.
Some books aren’t meant to be understood when you first read them.
They’re meant to wait quietly for the moment you’ve made it through—
and only then, they finally speak.
Note:
I and the Temple of Earth (我与地坛) is a short reflective essay by Chinese writer Shi Tiesheng. After becoming paralyzed due to illness, he spent years visiting the Temple of Earth in Beijing, quietly observing time, light, and life. The piece doesn’t speak loudly about pain—it reflects on it gently, like a long, slow conversation with fate. For those who’ve silently endured, it’s not just a book. It’s a quiet companion.
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