Su Shi
Clear the ground first
The first thing he did when the salary stopped
Letters from Huangzhou; Eight Poems of East Slope
Exiled to Huangzhou, his salary essentially gone. The first thing he did was not write poetry.
What actually happened?
In 1080 Su Shi arrived in Huangzhou holding an empty title, barred from official business, with almost no income and twenty-odd people to feed. What he did first was unglamorous: he petitioned for an abandoned military plot east of town — fifty acres of scrub hillside, which he and his family broke themselves — and planted wheat and rice, dug a well, built a house. 'East Slope' is not a poetic sobriquet. It's the name of the field. The poems came after the ground did.
Solve eating before you solve meaning
When income stops, the easiest thing to do is work out what this means about you. His order was the reverse: get this month and next year fed, and put the rest later. Not a refusal to think — thinking done hungry doesn't count anyway.
Newly out of work, the job is to do the arithmetic and find the next inflow, not to re-found your identity.
He also kept a ledger
Arriving in Huangzhou he split what money was left into thirty portions and hung them from a beam, taking one a day and saving the remainder in a tube for guests. The point isn't the amount. It's that 'how long can I last' became a number he could see.
Savings divided by monthly spend. Write the number of months down and keep it somewhere visible — a fear with a number attached is half the size.
What you make gives you a place to stand
The field produced more than grain: it produced a name. He stopped being a demoted official and became the layman of East Slope. When the old position is taken, finishing one concrete thing grows a new one faster than waiting to be recognised again.
One small complete thing finished while unemployed puts you back on your feet faster than a hundred applications.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: the income has stopped, or is about to, and you're circling what it means about you.
Ask first: where does this month's and next month's money come from? Write the numbers down, then count the months.
Where it goes wrong: reading this as never think long-term — he wrote his best work on that field; and 'farming' means any concrete thing that produces income now, not manual labour.
Lines to keep
Meaning arrived at while hungry mostly doesn't count.
When the old place is taken, finish one small thing.
A fear with a number attached is half the size.