My painting company has a bright future, and the boss has outstanding ability, broad contacts and good leadership. A year after I joined the company, the company expanded to include more artists. The business also expanded from the initial small scope to the whole country, and I traveled more and more often, and in the end, I went to all the provincial capitals and almost all the more famous cities in the southeast except the city where our school was located. I always avoided the city where my school was located on my business trips, and the first two times I shirked it with a reasonable excuse, and when I was sent the third time, as soon as my excuse came out, the bearded boss said, "It doesn't matter what story you have in that city, but you have to focus on your work." ”

"I've always put my work first. I said, "But I cherish life more." ”

"Your home city, your alma mater, will kill you?" he asked.

"Yes, indeed. I said, "I died once in that city." ”

He looked at me quietly for a while, relaxed himself, said that he would not embarrass me, and waved his hand to let me out. In the afternoon, I was told to change with a colleague, and I went to a small city with another colleague who needed to travel for a month and a half. We actually only stayed for a month in that city, and there was a mountain to the south of the city, and a river ran through the foothills, and our job was to draw the mountain range that belonged to the city, which was almost 14 kilometers long. It's autumn, the river is drizzling, and the mountains on the opposite side are yellow and green. My colleague and I wanted to finish the painting before the mountains were completely yellow, and we couldn't delay it in the rain. We sat in a makeshift tent prepared for us by the city government, which was open on all sides and breezy on all sides. During the time I worked, I hardly saw the sun, and finally the river level rose, flooding the riverbank path that usually pedestrians, and the river surface became wider.

In the last days of the work, our tents had been moved to the easternmost bank of the city, with a tributary running across the river, and across the tributary was the field after the harvest.

"Why don't you go to the city where your alma mater is located?" asked me.

I didn't answer him immediately, and when I was done with the important strokes, I put the brush down, stood up and stretched my body, and said, "It's too familiar." ”

"Did you really die once in that city?" he asked, "How did you die?"

"Frozen to death. I said.

"No wonder you're indifferent to the snowfall of the century. He said.

He finally asked me how I felt during my years at that school, and said that my school was the school he had always dreamed of, but he didn't get in, not because of the professional class, but because of the cultural class. He scored very high in sketching and watercolor in the college entrance examination, but he was too poor in cultural classes, scoring 15 points in mathematics, 62 in Chinese, 27 in English, and only 50 points in the comprehensive course with a total score of 300 points. He said that it was the worst time he got in high school from the mock to the college entrance examination, and he usually scored 40 to 50 points in mathematics, and he felt that God was against him. He came to the company a year later than me, and when we chatted for the first time, he knew my graduate school, and his words showed a tone of longing and reverence. After that, I often asked me about my studies in school, and asked me if I knew a professor who often read his aesthetic papers and art tutorials. I once asked Mr. Ou and said that he was greatly impressed by his insight in aesthetics and hoped to ask for advice in person one day.

He asked me which of the two rumors the company had about me was true. One was found naked in bed with someone else's wife, and the other was that I had always been a virgin, and I never knew what meat tasted like. He was cautious when he asked, wanting to ask but not daring to ask, but in the end he couldn't help but be curious and opened his mouth to ask. I asked him which one he thought was true? He said he didn't know, and then he said he was more inclined to think that the first rumor was true, and that he thought I couldn't be a virgin. He asked me how many girlfriends I had and I said I had never been in a relationship. He didn't believe it and thought I was lying to him. I told him to believe it or not.

"That seems to be the second type. He said.

I have the impression that he is a very nice lad except for a bit of a blind worship of the unknown. He was four years younger than me, dropped out of school and went home after failing the college entrance examination, doing nothing at home, immersed in God's complaints about his injustice every day. His family found him a good job through connections, but he didn't want it, and he had a passion for painting that no one could stop. After arguing with his family, he ran away from home on a drizzly morning, he was only a high school graduate, had no work experience, and only had two hundred and thirty-two dollars with him, which he spent on the way to the city. For the first three nights, he and a few homeless people huddled under the bridge without interfering with each other. He hoped to find a job painting for a living, but he never found it, and instead got on a fishing boat – just to eat. He told me that the captain of the fishing boat used to paint and finally told him not to give up painting.

I asked him if the fishing boat was blue, and he said yes. I asked him if the captain was bald, and every night when he was free to sit on deck and drink a bottle of unbranded wine in the direction of the ship, and if there was a short, thin black sailor, and if the ship was forever smelling of cursed. He answered yes and asked me why I knew so well.

"My first official job was on that ship. I said, "I can't even pee straight when I get ashore." ”

He stayed on the ship for a month, got the same salary as I did at the beginning, and was also in the labor market when he was brought to the company by the same person in a car for an interview. His experience made me wonder if the company had some kind of clandestine deal with the captain of the fishing boat. Hand-drawn company employees come in and out, and few have stabilized. Many people just regard this job as an emergency job to temporarily solve the problem of food and clothing, and when they have an income, they disappear without a trace. As a result, the company's recruitment efforts are going on almost every week, and there are employees who leave almost every week, but there are still a lot of people who stay. Colleagues almost never talk about drawing, and in the minds of most colleagues, painting is a matter of having to draw. He's completely different, he works in the company out of a heartfelt liking, and he's one of the few people I've ever met who still likes to draw after making it a career. When I left the company, he took my place as head of the hand-drawing department.

I left the company in the fall of the year after the Blizzard, a month after painting the mountains in that small county. I didn't quit on the fly, I thought about quitting after the blizzard of the century was gone. After that snowfall, I suddenly felt very tired, tired without a source, and this tired feeling made me miss the first few months of coming to the city. At that time, although I was plagued by economic problems, I was much happier to live a free and unrestrained life against the backdrop of this feeling of tiredness. I felt like I needed a long break.

But it took more than half a year for this decision to be put into action. On the train back from the small county town of Huashan Mountain, I wrote a resignation report by hand, and I wanted to hand it over to the boss the next day, but the resignation report was left on the train, and I had to write a new one. This is also the second time I have submitted my resignation report. I printed out the resignation report and sandwiched it under the mezzanine of the artboard for two days before handing it over to the boss of the skewer beard.

The resignation report I wrote on the train was long, two pages long, and it expressed my gratitude to the company, which made me grow and learn a lot. And I have repeatedly emphasized that I resigned for purely personal reasons, not for company reasons. But when I wrote on the computer for the second time, I felt that it was completely unnecessary to say so much, so I simply wrote a few lines, with a total of 57 words including the payment and time. But the bearded boss spent as if he was reading five hundred and seventy words. "It smells like paint and drawing boards. He looked at the resignation report and said, "It seems that you have been resigning for a long time. And said that I respect the choice of employees, and I can leave after handing over the work and completing the formalities. His reaction made me glad that the handwritten resignation report fell on the train.

On the day I left the company, I felt a little relieved when I stepped out of the company's door, but the feeling of tiredness seemed to be more serious, and I felt that I needed to rest urgently, but I didn't know how to take a break to make this tired feeling disappear. I was going to sleep until noon, but the habit of waking up early during work made me sleepy at 7 a.m., and the smell of the air when I woke up made me forget that I didn't have to go to work anymore. I was stuffed in the room, just reading and practicing. But all of this did not get me out of the feeling of tiredness.

Yingxiu learned about my resignation a week later, and I sat on the couch in his living room and told him. He asked me why I quit my job, and I told him I felt too tired and needed to rest. He asked me how I felt after resting, and I said that the tiredness was getting worse. He gave me his insight, and he said that I was tired not because of work, but because of nostalgia.

"You've always had a preoccupied look," he said, "and you've been in the city for more than three years, and you've not changed." ”

He finally told me that I needed to take a trip to change this state, and he said that I had only spent more than 20 years of my life in two cities up to that time, and that too little knowledge was also one of the causes of fatigue.

I didn't listen to Yingxiu's opinion, but stayed in a state of idleness for more than a month, and finally the feeling of tiredness disappeared completely, and I finally understood what the reason for that tired feeling was. The nostalgia that Yingxiu said is only a small part, and most of it is due to the fact that I have been doing things I don't like, and I have been under all kinds of pressure since I graduated. Although there was a period of dull and stable life, this dullness and stability only made the pressure hidden, not disappeared, and still secretly increased in the process of hiding. One day, when this umbrella is removed, all the more serious pressure than before suddenly bursts out, which makes people unprepared, and this pressure is reflected in the physical and mental end result is tiredness.

When I look back on my time in the city, I realize that my most relaxed days were when I was in the labor market. So, I went back to that labor market again, trying to find the feeling of the past. But everything has changed, and what you experience is no longer the original feeling, but the endless boredom of waiting. I looked at the people with tools and their feet to introduce their strengths, and knew that they were all waiting for a job that would fill their stomachs. Most people are middle-aged, they have passed the time of youth and frivolity, and they just want to live the second half of their lives peacefully with their own little skills. There are also a few people who are younger than me, or about the same age as me, who have a childish look on their faces, who have a good vision of the future, and most of whom believe that the labor market is just a passing point in their lives, and that it will disappear as they grow up. But because they are so young, they don't know that there are too many people who think the same way as them, so there are more middle-aged people who stay there regularly.

I'm glad I found out about this early on, so I didn't fall into the trap that my youth set for me. I tried to see the captain who had invited me to the fishing boat, and asked him how many of his painters had brought on his boat, and what kind of thoughts he wanted to convey to them, or to me, and I believe that he was ashamed of his desire to become a painter after an enlightenment, and that he must have had a height in painting and in life that I could not match. I spent the whole morning there and turned down five recruits.