When I was young, I had a revelation about destiny on a rainy day. The long rain of the day nourished all the hunger in me. I realized that fate is like trees and flowers. The process of growing from seed to flower is an internal unfolding, not a predetermined schedule, filled with the desired hours of fulfillment, without the hardships of life at all. Over the years, I have experienced the world again and again -- in the world of tall buildings, people hold up their dreams like umbrellas, they want to be able to touch each other's hearts. And all of this actually hinders our inner growth, preventing us from growing into the person we were meant to be. Because no matter how talented we are and how eager we are to build, we can't really go anywhere but stretch and bloom like orchids. I have found that no matter how small my accomplishments, if I neglect my natural calling, I lose sight of my growth as a soul, that my daily labors are meant to produce rather than to grow, and that all the effort to win the approval of others eventually wears me down, especially when the approval of others is the source of my life. Peace of mind comes from being in one's place and perceiving our connection to the larger universe, and the effort to make others remember us can drain our energy. When we avoid taking risks out of fear of failure, and persist in doing things out of fantasy about the future, we are prone to burnout. In fact, our mission is very simple, as long as we are constantly rooted in the earth under our feet, to extend their branches towards the sun. It is not easy to put down deep roots under one's feet and try to grow from them, but our journey in life will be much easier if we can understand that the core truth is actually revealed through proximity. This inside-out destiny is a conversation between the heart and the core truth, a flower blossoming in a conversation with the drizzle.

This is our dream coming true. I want to tell a story that is so old that no one knows who told it first, but we can feel that it relates to us. We no longer know whether the hero is a man or a woman, old or young. In fact, every time this story is told, we gain new enlightenment. Now let's suppose that the hero of the story is a girl named Kun. One day, Kun traversed the valley, on the way through a small mountain village when he witnessed a massacre, the whole village was ransacked, strewn with corpses, a river of blood. Kun shuttled between the bodies everywhere, was deeply shocked, suffering the fierce impact also expanded her feelings. She probed curiously at the broken limbs, shuddering at the merciless violence that ravaged life. An eerie silence hung over the land, as if it were a war between tribes. Suddenly, Kun heard a terrible cry of pain. She removed the body of a man and saw a dying woman with a baby in her arms, bleeding from the head. Kun knelt down, without thinking the mother and son into his arms. The woman's cry of grief is not only from unbearable pain, but also from her unable to protect their children, when she saw the Kun, feel more pain, she begged him to save her child, he was helpless at first, involuntarily shook his head, the mother tightly held her hand, passed out, the blood in the arms of the baby also lost consciousness. Now, all of Kun's life before that -- her destinations, her plans, her dreams -- had vanished into thin air. Now she can't afford to turn away. Kun gently picked up the baby, and though he was unconscious, he covered the baby's eyes as he walked through the dead bodies to leave the village. Kun holding the baby, couldn't help crying, for the man who saw his fall under the knife, his child bleeding but unable to do the mother, but also for the baby even if wake up, will have nothing. Kun all the way in the heart silently mourning the mother that just died, the pain of the voice has been circling in her ears.

Eventually, Kun climbed out of the valley and, exhausted, fell asleep at a hole. When she woke up, the baby in her arms had stopped breathing at some point. Kun suddenly became at a loss, although know powerless to return to the sky, but she still tightly hold the child in her hands, trying to brush aside his young eyes, see there is no possibility of survival. Looking at the empty eyes, he seemed to hear the cry of the whole world, as if the cry in the sky has been circling since ancient times, stretching forever. The pain almost suffocated Kun, but she held the baby tightly, as if the world would stop as soon as she put him down. Little did she know, she was embracing a world that was about to break, and her mind was opening up like a lotus as images flashed through her mind before the breaking: the dead babies, the betrayal, the disease, the murder, the thousands of people left to mourn their loved ones. Even though she couldn't tell where the world was crying from, it made her stronger. Finally, tired of her again deep sleep, in the sleep, he became a source of healing, she woke up, began to heal the wounded career, let the cry of the world in her ears constantly spinning disc reverberated. These cries became a song, which she did not understand, but she knew that, just as the wind blows the snow from the branches, so the cry will unconsciously sweep away the sorrow of the wounded heart. Kun may be the predecessor of the Buddhist Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, because Avalokitesvara means to listen to the cries of the world. In fact, it doesn't matter whether it is or not, many stories are like streams eventually converge into the sea, will converge into a story we learn from. No matter where we are, no matter where we wake up, we will hear the cry of the world in our own unique way like Kun. The cries never stop and suffocate, and we listen to the cries of the world with noble motives and keep them in our ears for a long time, so that the vitality of the world continues to burn. As Ehrke says at the beginning, the most important reason for "grief" is that it helps us to realize that we are one with all things, that all living things are our relatives. But it's easy to say that the challenges of grief are immense, and it's hard to appreciate the depth of meaning when we're caught up in the vortex of grief. The poet Caleb said, "If you hide it, if you keep it quiet, grief will bruise the soul." No matter what we do, we will not eliminate the crying of the world, because crying is the song of survival. When we try to silence or extinguish the voices of grief, we cut ourselves off from the life force that binds us to the world. If we are lost in the cry, we will be swallowed up by it, then what should we do with the cry of the world? I have found that my own experiences help me to understand others who have had similar experiences. This is the true meaning of compassion. The sliver of suffering we have experienced is like a thread given to us. Lift this thread and we can lift the whole cloth. I once twisted my back, so I could feel the old lady having to spend 20 minutes moving from the bread counter to the milk counter. I have been there, and I know why the man who lost his wife refused to lift his eyes from her grave because he did not want to believe that the woman he loved was gone forever. Having lived with cancer, I can understand why fearful souls find it difficult to wait outside the waiting room.

When I have been able to face the world crying, I also like a fluttering flag in the wind unfolded. One day when I was in college, sitting with my grandmother in her Brooklyn apartment, she looked at an old family photo on her desk and felt transported to another time and place, deep in thought. The photo, dated 1933, shows the young parents smiling as if they had the world in their hands. When Grandma came to her senses, I asked curiously who the man in the photo was. She said it was her sister, her brother-in-law and their young son, who were living in Budapest at the time. Grandma paused for another long time, then said with a deep sigh, "At that time, we scrimped and saved and bought them three tickets to come to America." "But they sent the tickets back," she continued, dropping her heavy hands on her lap. "They wrote us that Romania was their home." In the end, they all died in the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald. Holding on to this thread of Grandma's memory, my heart slowly opened for the cries of the Nazi Holocaust, and for the souls of all the cries of the Holocaust throughout history. These cries pushed me into a great grief, and I could not sleep. Later, I realized that the only reason I had opened myself up to that horrible history of suffering was to feel the truth of what it was to be human. We need to let the suffering pour down and wash away our open heart just as Kun let the cries of the whole world wash away her heart hundreds of years ago. One must learn to return to calm from turbulent suffering, especially unnecessary suffering, but that does not mean we should turn our backs on a violent world. Because a truly engaged mind produces antibodies when injected with a little violence. As our hearts open with compassion, the heart itself strengthens resistance and increases the strength of humanity as a whole. Can I prove it? No. But am I sure? The answer is yes. Aren't we still here? One might immediately say, "I don't know." But you and I are still on this earth, alive instead of dead, defenseless instead of calloused, kind instead of cruel -- though each of us is, in fact, a little cruel. Our own little bit of suffering is like giving us a thread that allows us to pull up the whole fabric. This is the true meaning of compassion. It's not surprising that we gradually become desensitized. Even the bravest among us, the ones who do the most for the good of others, become more and more numb with fatigue, because their minds are unable to carry any more weight and need time to process what has happened in their lives. When we are overburdened and overwhelmed, we begin to withdraw from the world so that the inner world can supply us with information. Perhaps the noblest personal act of all is the long-neglected effort to turn inward: to open our hearts when the doors are closing, to open our souls when they shrink in fear, to soften our minds when the storms of life have sharpened our minds. Often what seems hard, numb and shy inside of us turns out to be the face of compassion, and through this inner compassion, we can restore the glory of humanity. Our compassion has been waiting to awaken our sleeping life. When our hearts are open, we can touch the oneness to which we belong. Then, when we are lost, we can lift up the windmill of the spirit and let the wind of the crying world turn it over and over again, until our windmill spin has accumulated enough kinetic energy to put into the whole world. It's hard to stay alive and alert, and people often try not to look at the suffering, but the truth is, we can't just ignore it, any more than a high mountain can resist the deep erosion of groundwater. And there are dangers in running away from the cries of the world. In extreme cases, our indifference can turn us into the kind of people who seek pleasure in other people's suffering. There's a word in German called "Schadenfreude," and that's what it means. This kind of perverted fun comes from the most extreme denial of human nature. Running away from pain only makes us a little mouse on the run. When a person withdraws from the world, the need for perception doesn't disappear, it gets distorted. The English phrase "Roman Holiday" refers to those people in the stands who, during the Roman Empire, found amusement in the bloodspattered bloodbaths of gladiators. In today's 24-hour news, we face the same potential danger. We can connect with people all over the world in seconds, like 9/11 in New York and the massacre of 20 schoolchildren in Connecticut. Like the ancient legend of the Kun, we are forced to look at the bloody facts of the tragedy, with trembling hearts in these heinous violence glimpse a revelation -- how small and fragile we are living on this earth! Still, if we're not careful, replaying the tragedy from all angles can instead push us to the other extreme -- and we ourselves become spectators of those perverted Roman Gladiators Shouting excitement from the stands. It is a greater tragedy to watch the tragedy in a numb, unconscious way, for we thus degenerate into a dark voyeur. But just as the suffering of the ages is heard when he clasps a dead baby in his arms, keeping our hearts open in the face of torn life will allow us to hear and feel the cries of all those who suffer.