I am as deep and distant as life

The wind dwells in my wishes

The soldering iron is on top of my tongue

How do you determine my love, hatred, and ideals?

Can you make me understand:

The sun is the color of my eyes

Ice and snow are the color of my steps.

——— Adonis

My favorite class is an elective course called Plant Appreciation, and the interesting thing about this class is that the teacher will give us homework to actually raise a plant and observe its growth. At that time, when I was choosing a course, my father kept asking me to choose a social etiquette class, knowing that I chose plant appreciation and was very angry, he thought that it was completely useless to learn this, how good and practical it was to learn social etiquette. If it were now, I would definitely say unceremoniously: "You don't even have a good life for your own dog, why should you point fingers at my life?" However, at that time, I was very cowardly, in my eyes, my father was the authority, it was everything, and everything he said was right. He was my faith, so much so that for a long, long time after this faith collapsed, I was so confused that I couldn't find a role model in life. Even, I no longer trust people, and I feel surrounded by a sense of powerlessness in life for a long, long time.

The plant I chose was a pot of cactus, a cactus with magenta buds, and I took pictures of it every week, recorded the weather of that day, recorded what it looked like that day, and remember to water it every few days to let it bask in the sun, and unconsciously became a very meaningful thing, feeling that I was not completing my homework, but taking care of a child. But then, my child was eaten by maggots, and I planted it in the flower bed downstairs before the holidays, hoping that it would be well watered and grow up in the sun, but I forgot that the trees in the south were too strong, the air in the south was too humid, and the soil in the south was too nutritious, and these conditions made my child die. Like those stupid parents, I let my children die by the seedlings. Cactus is a very strong plant, drought tolerance does not mean that it does not need water, in the right soil and sufficient light conditions, the cactus can grow tall and beautiful.

The teacher said that plants are different from people, and that they can live well with a little patience and a little attention. I really liked the teacher of this course, she was a doctorate, and for me at the time, a doctorate was a very mysterious title. She was the first Ph.D. to teach, and she really looked like a Ph.D., very human in addition to erudition. Later, each of my teachers was a Ph.D., but I couldn't feel their compassion and humanity for everything. At that time, Zhihu was popular, and it was a little purer than the "Zhihu, share the story you just made" that flooded later. The teacher recommended it, there was a teenager on Zhihu who died, I bought his book, a book written by a twenty-year-old boy, I cried when I read it for the first time, literature and death are inherently linked, but when I read the hope for life from the pen of a teenager facing death, I felt the weight of a life.

This course that my dad said I didn't want to take was the least regrettable choice I had, and if I had followed his advice and learned the so-called social etiquette, would I have become good at socializing? I don't agree, it's inherently wrong to measure everything with pragmatism, and even if we learn social etiquette, the distance to people is not necessarily closer, we always like to socialize with people who make us feel comfortable, and most people have preferences, there are people who want to be close to people, and people who don't want to be close. It is better to learn some psychology and grasp the weaknesses of human nature before getting along with people by relying on skills. You can't be too pragmatic to be a man, so many people who learned successfully back then lived like chicken blood, but none of them really succeeded.

When I passed by the green cherry tree, I went to look at it again, and now that the flowers are gone, it is no longer distinguishable from the surrounding trees, and if I hadn't memorized its location at the time, I might not have been able to find it. It always blooms when it should bloom and withers when it should wither, and just like that, calmly copes with every spring and autumn.