Mind and feeling
Su Shi
Unbowed
Su Shi (Northern Song · 1037–1101) — Unbowed.
What actually happened?
It is worth knowing the range before the philosophy. The same man who wrote the most quoted lines in the language dredged the West Lake at Hangzhou and built a causeway across it that still carries his name; set up what may be China's first public clinic; campaigned to stop infant drowning in Huangzhou; lived on the city wall during a flood at Xuzhou saying that while he was there the water would not take the city; and left recipes. None of that is decoration on the poetry. It is the same disposition doing different work.
The openness has a structure
It wasn't a temperament he was born with. His writing records the sequence: the blow lands, there is a long stretch of real pain, attention turns inward, the present moment turns out to be full, and only then the release. He didn't skip to serenity. He walked through the middle.
The constraint produced the work
His three years in Huangzhou produced the two Red Cliff rhapsodies and his best-known lyrics. Having lost the ability to change anything outside himself, he was left with what he could still do — and that turned out to be the most concentrated output of his life.
He lost the politics and won everything else
He opposed the reformers' new laws, then opposed the conservatives when they abolished all of them. He held to the measure rather than the side, and both sides exiled him for it. In the political record he is a failure. A thousand years later he is the one people quote.
How do I use it today?
Next time you're overruled, shelved, or watching something fail, try treating the stretch that follows as an enforced turn inward. The best thinking and the best work often happen in the period when there is nothing to administer.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
Where the heart is at rest, that is my home.