Su Shi
Huangzhou, Huizhou, Danzhou
Doing real work where you were sent to rot
Written on My Own Portrait; History of Song
Asked at the end of his life to name what he'd accomplished, he named three places he'd been banished to. Why those?
What actually happened?
A year before he died, Su Shi saw a portrait of himself in a temple and wrote a few lines under it. He had been a Hanlin academician and a minister of rites. He listed none of that. Asked what I accomplished: Huangzhou, Huizhou, Danzhou — his three places of exile, each further from the capital than the last, the third on a tropical island then considered the edge of the world.
Treat the exile as a term in office
Sent somewhere with no resources and no future, most people wait it out. He treated each posting as a term: what does this place most lack, and what can I leave behind. Rank sets your authority, not whether you work.
Moved to a dead-end team you can wait two years for an opening — or ask what the worst thing in this team is and whether you can fix it. One of those leaves you holding something.
Leave things somebody can point at
A lake dredged and a causeway built. A society to stop infant drowning. A public clinic. A school on an island that had never produced a scholar. Abstract achievements evaporate when the scoring changes; objects stay.
Three years in a job — how many things can someone point at and say he did that? If the answer is none, the three years are hard for anyone to credit.
He set the measure himself
By the official ledger his career was the titles. By listing three places of banishment he announced that the ruler measuring his life was in his own hand. That isn't consolation. It's taking the scorekeeping back.
A CV of titles held, or a CV of three things finished — two different accounts of who you think you are.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: you've been put somewhere with no resources and no prospects.
Ask first: what does this place most lack right now, and what could I leave behind that someone could point at?
Where it goes wrong: treating endurance as a strategy; scoring yourself in titles instead of finished things.
Lines to keep
While I am here, the water will not take this city.
A heart like burnt-out wood, a body like an unmoored boat.