原作 肖复兴 翻译 拉拉斯

I received an email from my son, telling me this winter vacation he is going to drive all the way from North to South in America, with a route designed to cross 11 states. The third day on the road, he called me from Austen, Texas, with an unhidden excitement, he told me: “Dad, O.Henry’s Museum locates here, you know, the guy who wrote The Last Leaf. Yesterday, I also visited Elvis Presley’s old house in Memphis, when I drove by.”

I envy him and I support him. He should drift to faraway places when young. This journey will show him everything that he has never seen before. It will widen the radius of his life, expanding like the rim of a puddle of water.

I remembered a late night in the early spring, I was transferring in a train station of West Berlin, alone. There were only very few people on the platform, one of which looked like Chinese, so I approached him and I was right. He was there to pick up someone. I learnt from our chit chat that he graduated from Tianjin University and came to study electronics. Even the conversation was more than a decade ago, I could still recall a specific sentence he said vividly: “When I first arrived in Berlin, I only had 10 dollars left in my pocket.” I was amazed by the fact that he had the courage to take the adventure abroad with only 10 dollars. I was wondering all the sacrifices that he must have paid for this: living in a foreign country, where there was nobody to rely on; having nothing to fill his stomach but the wind and nowhere to shelter but in the open air. Drifting is his destiny and it also becomes his personality.

It also reminded me of myself, driving all the way up north to the wilderness, at an age even younger than my son is today. As soon as I arrived there, I was beaten by the wind and coldness and nostalgia and homesickness, as if I was in the outer space. My heart was floating like a kite with a broken thread, not knowing where to land. At that time, I not only witnessed much cruelty and pain, but also felt much love and kindness from both the place and the people. These composed the melodies of my youth and later also became my unforgettable memories.

Yes. The heart of youth is unsettled, reckless, full of imagination. It fantasizes faraway places so people can be brave enough to jump out of their comfort zone to drift. However, drifting is not the same as traveling. You must pay a huge price in order to taste more flavors of the life. It is never the same flavor of a cup of hot Starbucks coffee in a cozy winter day. One can only drift when young. It not only requires courage, but also a young body with imagination. With these, you can get what you can only experience when young and the precious memory to reflect on in retrospect. If there is anything that is not regrettable in one’s life, in my mind, is the joy of childhood games, the experience of youth adventures and all the memories that one can still grip in aged years.

If one spends a whole life living in a comfortable warm house and never steps out, no matter what type of luxury life one leads, with the fanciest clothes and the most delicate food, still he/she will not be physically healthy. If one never leaves his/her home, even if with the best family one could possibly have on earth, one will still be short-sighted and lack an ambitious vision. Don’t anchor your heart too early into a small swamp, like a wreck fell into the sweetness of sirens’ home. Don’t waste your life in the virtual world and your little cozy nest. It only makes your life as thin as angel’s hair and turn you into a snail, getting old without experiencing youth, who only gets out of the heavy shell during the short period when the shower stops, peeping into the gray sky and thinking: “Hmmm, the sky is just so small and so dirty.”

Youth is supposed to be like a dandelion in the spring. No matter how weak, how small, how incapable to grow a pair of wings it is, it still manages to go afar, just by taking a ride with the wind. Even if it has no idea where the journey will lead to, it still wants to take an adventure to the virgin land. Only in this way, you will learn that the world is not just a beautiful glass house and only in this way, you will see all the walls that used to block your heart collapse. Then, you can truly savour life. Life is more than endless jam during the day, tedious soap opera at night, escalating fights within households and the house-of-cards type of office politics.

The world-renowed Italian explorer Marco Polo sailed to Anatolia with his father and uncle at the age of 17. By the age of 21, he had already wandered all around China by himself. The famous American navigator Captain Cook first realized his ambitious sailing dream on a trip to the North Sea, when he was just 21. The Austrian musician, Schubert, left home to Viena to start an austere pilgrim of art, when he just turned 20. Xiake Xu, a Chinese traveler of Ming Dynasty, began his arduous journey at 22, to fulfill a dream of walking more than 10,000 miles and reading more than 10,000 books. Of course, we can also name more recent example, like the migrants in Beijing, who live in suburban shacks. They also start their drifting at a very young age. Youth is the capital of your journey, the passport of your travel, the talisman of your adventure. Drifting, is to set free the dream of a youth, to open up one’s heart, to write down the first chapter of one’s life. So, even if the journey is as hard and as unexpected as it was depicted in Schubert’sWinterreise,like walking in the void of the universe, where the sky and the earth are blended, where one cannot see what is ahead and nor what is behind, it still worths a try.

A poem inTheCrescent Moonby Tagore came into my mind:

“If he would only lend me his boat, I should man her with a hundred oars, and hoist sails, five or six or seven.

I should never steer her to stupid markets.

I should sail the seven seas and the thirteen rivers of fairyland.

But, mother, you won’t weep for me in a corner.

I am not going into the forest like Ramachandra to come back only after fourteen years.

I shall become the prince of the story, and fill my boat with whatever I like.

I shall take my friend Ashu with me. We shall sail merrily across the ever seas and the thirteen rivers of fairyland.

We shall set sail in the early morning light.

When at noon tide you are bathing at the pond, we shall be in the land of a strange king.

We shall pass the ford of Tirpurni, and leave behind us the desert of Tepantar.

When we come back it will be getting dark, and I shall tell you of all that we have seen.

I shall cross the seven seas and the thirteen rivers of fairyland.”

So, send youself into exile and borrow a canvas to sail. Don’t go to the stupid markets but drift to faraway places. You can only have these adventurous experiences and valuable gains, which one can only find in Tagore’s fiary tales, when you are young. The journey not just turned into verses that he wrote with heart, but also will be carved in your life like the annual rings of a tree.