Chapter 21 Contentment

I once saw the old man Bing Xin write a motto for others: "Be content and know your insufficiency, do what you can do and what you can't do." The words are concise and intriguing.Two close-up essays with a little explanation.Let me first talk about knowing enough and knowing enough. There is an old saying in China: "Contentment is always happiness." It is followed by everyone.What is "contentment"?Or look it up in a dictionary first. "Modern Chinese Dictionary" says: "Contentment: to be satisfied with what you have already got (referring to life, wishes, etc.)." If everyone can be satisfied with what they have already got, the society will be stable and the world will be peaceful. This is the truth Obvious.However, there will always be some people in society who are restless and self-conscious, and toads want to eat swan meat.Such people are often going to stumble.For them, the phrase "satisfaction and happiness" has become a panacea.

However, contentment or dissatisfaction also depends on the occasion.In the old society, the poor ate grass roots and bark, while the rich ate bird's nest and shark fin.On such an occasion, can you persuade the poor to be content?On the contrary, they should be encouraged not to be content but to rise up and struggle.Such dissatisfaction is justified and of great significance. It can uphold social justice and promote the advancement of human society. In addition to the occasion, contentment also has a point (fen) problem.What is a score?Generally speaking, it is the appropriate limit.People often say "safety", "unfettered" and so on, referring to limits.This limit is also extremely difficult to grasp, and it varies from person to person and from place to place.If you are reluctant to find a standard, it is "conventional".I think that the reason why the old man Bing Xin wrote this sentence is just to persuade people to stop having unreasonable thoughts.

As for lack of knowledge, although they are literally the same in Chinese, their meanings are different.The so-called "deficiency" here refers to "deficiencies", "not perfect".This sentence is related to "self-knowledge". Since ancient times, there has been an old saying in China: "People are valuable if they have self-knowledge." This sentence implies to us that it is not easy to have self-knowledge, otherwise there is no need to say this sentence.In fact, it is true.Take the present as an example, most of the people I meet feel good about themselves.As far as the academic world is concerned, some people have not read a few books, but they don't know the heights of the sky and the earth, and they call themselves geniuses, relying on their own little cleverness-can this be considered smart? ——Arrogant and reckless, scolding all the literati in the world, it is like sweeping the world with a hair cone, making people with discerning eyes feel both ridiculous and pitiful.Such people are often of no use.Because, there is another old Chinese saying: "Learning is like sailing against the current, if you don't advance, you will retreat." There is also an old Chinese saying: "The sea of ​​learning has no limit." It is all true.But in the eyes of these people, they have already lost the source of learning, and there is no way forward, and progress is unnecessary.What else can they do but self-admiration?

The ancient Greeks also believed that self-knowledge is valuable, so they said earnestly: "Know yourself!" China and Greece are thousands of miles away, but they said almost exactly the same words, which shows that these words are universal truths.Thousands of years of history of thought and science both at home and abroad have also proved the fact that only those with insufficient knowledge can make contributions to human culture. February 21, 2001