Chapter 4: I Want to Be Better

At the end of every year, many people write a list.

Next year: read fifty books. Lose ten pounds. Get up at six every morning. Run three times a week. Less phone, more time with the family. Learn a language. Save some money. Break the habit of putting things off. Written in a notebook or saved on the phone, and the moment it is written, something lights up a little: next year’s me will be better than this year’s.

By March of the next year, one or two things on the list are done, and the rest are quietly not looked at. At the end of the year, another list.

“I want to be better,” “I want to become a better version of myself”: the phrase is everywhere now. Rows of books in the bookshop teach it, one app after another on the phone helps: counting steps, counting water, counting sleep, counting pages read, counting how many days in a row you have checked in. A hundred days in a row, and a little badge pops up on the screen.

Wanting to be better is not bad at all. Days going a bit better, a body a bit sturdier, a temper a bit gentler, a few more skills: these are real goods.

But sometimes something else is hidden in this phrase.

Someone sets the alarm for six. It rings, he turns it off, sleeps twenty minutes more. When he gets up, the first thought is not “a new day” but: failed again. All day there is a little grey inside.

Someone steps on the scales, and the number is half a pound more than yesterday. He stares at it like a verdict. That day, every mouthful at every meal carries a little guilt.

Someone has bought lots of courses on his phone, saved lots of articles “to read later,” his favorites folder full. He seldom opens them. But while saving them he felt steady: I’m making progress, or at least I’m getting ready to.

Someone scrolls through other people’s lives: people his age promoted, starting companies, getting abs, reading a hundred books a year. He puts the phone down and something sinks: why am I still here? How much time have I wasted?

Someone has checked in forty-seven days in a row; on the forty-eighth he works overtime till midnight and forgets. The next day he sees the number back at zero. He sits stunned a long time, as if he had lost something very expensive; afterwards he simply stops.

Someone in his twenties drew up a timetable for himself: achieve this before such an age, that before such an age. Past the age, not achieved, he feels his whole life has gone wrong somewhere, like a train that pulled into the wrong station and can never catch up.

And a sentence many people have said to themselves: when I’m better, I’ll… When I’m thinner, I’ll have photos taken; when I’ve earned enough, I’ll travel; when I’ve fixed these faults, I can really like myself.

In these shapes there is often a hidden assumption: the me of now doesn’t count yet.

The me of now is a draft, a half-finished product, a stretch of road from “not good enough” to “good enough.” The real me is up ahead, after every item on the list is ticked, in that better self. This one now is lived in order to get there; it cannot yet be treated well, and does not yet deserve to be liked.

So people dare not stop. Stopping seems to mean falling behind, being overtaken, being left by that train. So people fear losing control: one day missed, and it is as if a brick fell out of the wall and the whole house still to be built swayed.

This weariness is far heavier than doing the things themselves. Running was only running, reading only reading; with the sign “I have to get better” on your back, every step run and every page read becomes answering an exam paper, and answering badly means you are no good.

There are two more hidden “I”s in here.

One is the I that wants to remake itself. It looks at this person now and is dissatisfied everywhere: too fat, too lazy, too weak, too quick-tempered. It wants to take this person apart and rebuild, be born again, turned into another kind of person. It has never considered that the person it despises is the very body and heart in which it eats and sleeps every day.

The other is the designing I. It holds a blueprint: my life was supposed to go like this, this at such an age, there by such an age. Once the days stop following the blueprint, it feels the days are wrong, it is wrong, something is broken. It has never considered that this blueprint, too, was drawn by itself one afternoon in some year; the days never signed it.

What is “changing,” really?

When people say “getting better,” what they mostly have in mind is a ladder: climb a rung, a bit higher, a bit better; reach the top, and that is the best me. Slip down a rung, and that is going backward, failing.

But change in a person has never been a ladder.

In a year, someone grows a bit stronger, but his eyes get a bit worse; his temper gets a bit better, but he becomes more impatient about some things; he understands a few more things, but some of the old fearlessness is gone. Some things got better, some worse, some didn’t change, some turned into something else that can’t be called better or worse. A person never climbs upward all at once; many places change together, each its own way, fast and slow, forward and back.

This is not a ladder; this is becoming. A tree grows a ring a year, but not every ring is wider than the last: in a good year, with plenty of rain, the ring is wide; in a bad year, in drought, the ring is narrow. The narrow ring is not the tree going backward; that was simply how it grew that year. Saw open an old tree: ring after ring, wide and narrow, every ring a year it truly lived. No ring is a draft; no ring grew for the sake of the rings after it.

Every year of a person is a ring like that.

So “getting better” is real; the days really can get better, a person really can have a few fewer faults and a few more skills, and all this is solid and has its consequences. Only getting better changes the days, not being. Someone who loses ten pounds is not more by a bit than when he was heavier; the one who quit smoking is not more than in the years he smoked; the year fifty books were read was not more fully being than a year without a single book.

Being is not on the ladder. Being is each ring itself.

Then this one now is not a draft.

The morning the alarm rang and you didn’t get up was a full morning: the quilt warm, birds outside the window, a very short dream in those extra twenty minutes. The moment on the scales was a full moment: the soles of the feet cold, the number jumping, something sinking inside. The day the check-in count went back to zero was a day too, not a bit less.

This one is not here for the sake of a better one in the future. That better one, when it arrives, will only be another “this one,” fully here, not more than this one now. If this one now does not count, then when that one arrives it will feel it doesn’t count either, and write another list, and chase the next better one. A person would spend a whole life chasing, always on the road, always feeling real life hasn’t begun.

When I’m better, I can really like myself. This sentence can be turned round: this one now is already one occurrence of being. It need not get better first to be treated well.

Push this one layer further down. In “I want to be better” there are two I’s: the good one in the future, and the not-enough one now. The first is the one accepted; the one now is treated only as a road to it, temporary lodging, rented. So inside there is always a distance: I am here, the real me is there. With that distance, the days have a pull forward and also a weight dragging down; one day missed, and you are a bit further away, a bit more panicked.

But where is that good future me, right now? It is only a thought arising now, a picture, a hope; the moment it is, it is just this place, now, taking the shape of “hoping.” What is really here has only ever been this one: the one who didn’t get up, the one on the scales, the one staring at the zero. When you are lazy, the lazy one is you; when you are diligent, the diligent one is you too; the fat you and the slimmer you are both you, and neither is a draft of the other. Draft and final copy need two sheets of paper; here there has only ever been one, always being written, and wherever it has got to, that is the whole of it.

If that good future me really comes, the moment it comes it will only be this one taking the shape of “a bit better,” as whole and as full as now. If only it counted, then the moment it arrived, a person would at once hope for the next; the distance would always be one step ahead, the person always on the road, never arrived. Lazy or diligent, good or poor, each was always wholly this one occurrence; there was never anywhere to put that distance. Change goes on all the same; sometimes it happens of itself. Only, at whatever step it reaches, that step is wholly you, owing nothing to what is ahead, losing nothing to what is behind. This occurrence need not first become another to be the real you. The one wanting to change is you; changed, it is you again; not changed, there is no second someone standing behind waiting to be rescued.

Getting better has its real weight: a bit less pain, a bit more skill, a bit easier for those around you. But there is one thing it cannot do: it cannot turn back and retroactively certify the earlier person as real. If the earlier fat, lazy, always-late-up me only counted once today’s me had got better, then today’s me would also have to wait for a better tomorrow to count; tomorrow’s, for the day after. Waiting all the way along, no day would ever count; yet every day has plainly been lived, meals eaten, sleep slept, pains felt. So it is not that getting better approves the past; each of those earlier days was there of itself, and getting better grew precisely out of those days. The narrow ring did not wait for the wide one to vouch for it; the wide one, rather, grew around it.

There is another phrase that “getting better” often wears: I’m in charge.

To get better, a person must be able to control himself. Control the mouth, the hands, the temper, the time. Self-discipline means I’m in charge: if I say get up at such a time, I get up; if I say don’t eat, I don’t. In control, there is steadiness inside; lose control, and there is panic: how come I can’t control myself again? This “can’t control” is often more distressing than the thing itself, as if someone supposed to be in the driver’s seat had been found without the wheel in his hands.

What does “self” in Chinese originally mean?

In everyday Chinese, zi, “self,” comes in a long string of words: zilaishui, tap water, “water that comes by itself”—no one has to carry it, turn the tap and it comes; zidongmen, an automatic door—someone approaches and the door opens by itself; ziran, nature—no one arranges it, it is so by itself. A cut on the hand heals by itself in a few days; no one inside directs its growth. A child grows a few centimeters a year; no child grows taller through self-discipline. All these zi say “just by itself”: no pushing, no effort, no one behind giving orders.

The “self” of being means just this: being by itself, moving by itself, arising by itself. It is not that there is first an I in the driver’s seat who then sets all this going.

In a person, most things move by themselves in this way. The heartbeat is not for “I” to decide, food breaking down in the stomach is not for “I” to decide, falling asleep is not for “I” to decide, whether a thought comes up is not for “I” to decide, when a flash of anger rises is not for “I” to decide. Even the decisions people make—to get up or not, to eat that piece of cake or not—arise again and again out of this great field of things not for “I” to decide: whether you slept well last night, how you feel today, where the cake is, whether anyone is nearby, all of it pulled in.

This is not to say a person can do nothing. A person can do a great deal: decide to go or not, change a bad habit, learn a trade, step by step make the days a bit better. All this is real. Only, while doing it, there is no one holding the wheel from start to finish; there is only this place, amid many pulls, leaning a little this way, a little that way, again and again. Lean well, and the days go more smoothly; lean badly, and lean again next time.

Seen this way, “can’t control myself” is nothing to be ashamed of. There never was anyone in control all along. Breaking a resolution is not an owner failing in his duty; it is this place, that day, leaning that way. Tomorrow it may lean this way.

Seeds, rivers, cats are always changing too, yet none of them has ever said “I want to be better.”

A seed falls into the soil, with no plan, no goal, no timetable. It rains, the soil gets damp and warm, and it splits by itself, sending down a little white root and pushing up a bit of green. Once up, it meets a stone and goes round it; it meets shade and leans toward the light. It does not know what it will grow into, and has no blueprint. Every shape it grows into is made by that day’s soil, that day’s rain, that day’s light, and itself together.

A river has changed course several times over a few hundred years. Not once did the river want to get better; a great flood broke a gap, and it went that way. The new course is no more a river than the old.

A cat, from kitten to old age, never once wanted to be a better cat. Hungry, it cries; sleepy, it sleeps; sun, and it goes to bask; an insect, and it pounces. Old, unable to jump onto the table, it sleeps under it. All its life it changes, from a little ball of fluff into a thin old cat; every day it is fully a cat.

These things all change, no less than people. They change because they are, and being is moving, becoming; not because someone behind is pushing them toward a “better.” This change has no ladder, no endpoint, no draft.

In a person too there is this kind of change, and it is the greater part. Children don’t grow up by checking in; wounds don’t heal by self-discipline; a person slowly becoming understanding is often not because he made a resolution one day, but because the pains he has suffered, the people he has met, the roads he has walked these years have worn him into this shape bit by bit. People think their growth was built single-handed by the “I” in charge; in fact most of it grew by itself. That “I,” along the way, sometimes lent a hand, sometimes got in the way.

This is not to stop people writing lists. Lists can still be written, runs still run, books still read. Sometimes, as you go along, the sentence underneath, “the me of now doesn’t count,” loosens by itself; sometimes it is still pressing down. On the mornings it presses, every step run is still there too.

When it loosens, running is just running: wind on the face, legs a bit sore, warm all over afterward. Reading is just reading: a good sentence, a pause, a while of thinking. The day you didn’t run is the day you didn’t run; that day, too, has been fully lived.

The one whose check-in count went to zero, a few days later, wakes early one morning, just as it is getting light, puts on his shoes and goes out. No check-in, no badge, and no telling himself “stick to it today.” He just wants to run a while.

There are few people on the street; the sweeper has just been over it once, and the breakfast stall by the road is setting up its wok. He runs two streets, can’t run any more, walks slowly back, and buys two youtiao.