Su Shi
No wind, no rain, no sun
Switching off the scoring
Dingfengbo, 1082
Everyone else on the road was miserable. He was not. What exactly did he switch off in that moment?
What actually happened?
In 1082 Su Shi — a Song poet two years into exile, recently released from a prison that nearly killed him — was caught in rain on a country road. The servant with the rain gear had gone ahead. Everyone was wretched; he wasn't. When it stopped he wrote a short poem. It ends by looking back at the road he had just walked: there had been no wind, no rain, and no sun either.
Wretched is a verdict, not a fact
Same rain, same road. The difference isn't who got wet. It's who filed the afternoon under 'this is going badly.' Misery needs a scoring system to exist. Switch that off and what's left is water hitting you.
Same demotion: one person is flattened for three months, another starts something new that week. The facts match. One of them kept looking through the frame.
Why not walk slowly
The rain gear is gone. Walking faster gets you marginally less wet and costs you the walk. His line isn't bravado; it's arithmetic: don't spend more of yourself accelerating through the part you can't change.
It's decided and the result is in. Do the post-mortem once. The replaying changes nothing — it's just running in the rain.
The last line is the hard one
'No wind, no rain, no sun' doesn't claim it never rained. It says that from far enough along the road, neither the storm nor the sun is an event. That view is only true afterwards — which is why it's worth borrowing early.
Stuck on a criticism from one meeting: what share of my memory will this hold in three years? The answer is almost always none.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: something bad is settled and you keep replaying it.
Ask first: is the pain the thing itself, or the frame I keep putting around it?
Where it goes wrong: reading this as permission not to deal with the problem, or using 'this too shall pass' to skip the thing you should do today.
Lines to keep
Don't listen to the rain in the leaves. Walk on, and hum.
Looking back at that bleak road — no wind, no rain, no sun.
A bamboo stick and straw sandals beat a horse. Who's afraid?