人生不是辆列车，是片农场：Change Your Narrative

【英语播客】Niki的英文语音备忘录

10分钟 ·3年前

2904

We oftentimes see the analogy that life is like a train.

We are headed to "a destination", and "people come and go".

But these are all wrong assumptions about life that potentially insinuate that we cannot assert power over our own life.

Today I would like to change the narrative.

Life is a farmland that we maintain; we don't have to have a destination, and we have a say on whom we attract into and expel out of our lives.

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燕云十七

2022.4.08

Those who compare life to boarding a train and waiting until the destination may want to point out some passive sad nature of life: one cannot actively decide anything other than the destination at the start of their lifetimes. It is somewhat true itself; but some further interpretations of this idea could lead to two extremes, both are bad. One extreme is that after knowing this some people may have exacerbated anxiety because they feel less controllability over things they want to achieve in their lives. Another extreme is that some people feel it’s better to “lie on one’s back” completely since no control could mean no hope.

Your analogy between spending a life and managing a garden rectifies these misunderstandings. The ends of our lives are all about tombs but this fact, definitely, is neither suggesting that we cannot change anything during or after our lifetimes, nor implying that we have to rush towards the destination all the time without rests. I tend to compare life to a voyage (which is more exciting than being a gardener anyways), and during the voyage the transportation way is not limited to merely the train, or the ship, or the vehicle, etc. We can get on and off at any times, make changes to the path, find the right person to meet, etc. It makes me think of the movie, The Legend of 1900, that even staying on a cruise for the whole life can still make a huge difference to the world, see different things, and make people memorize you, if and only if you like it and choose to do it.

BT主播Niki

:1. whatever the analogy is, the point is to trigger our thoughts so that we can have a real connection with our life. This itself is full of meaning; 2. voyage seems nice! gives me a sailor kinda vibe. I like it! 3. the story of 1900 for me is a little sad. I think he could have experienced more.

燕云十七:The story of the character may have to serve the directors’ needs to pay salute to the ending of a ‘beautiful’ age in their perception, as the name 1900 suggests.