Seize the Day, Seize the Hour 一万年太久，只争朝夕

cn-reader (61)in #story • 6 years ago

Ten thousand years are too long, seize the day, seize the hour. I’m afraid only great people have so great vision and inspiration. If they are too far away from us, the stories around us are even more meaningful.

Lao Shen, born in a poor family in a small village of Taian City, was educated in Qingdao Institute of Textile Industry (merged into Qingdao University in 1990s) in 1980s. The scholarship during the University was not enough for him to make ends meet, so he often went home by train to prepare food with other students’ identity card which can enjoy the half price ticket. It took a whole night for his mother to make a baggage of pancakes. On the second day, he returned to school carrying the pancakes and went home again after a period of time.

After graduating from the University, Lao Shen was assigned to work in a large state-owned enterprise – Taian Textile and Knitting Mill. In 1989, when I graduated from Shandong Textile Industrial School, I had the privilege of getting to know him. At college, Lao Shen was fond of computers and taught himself. Not good at words or willing to fawn on others, he was still not promoted after he began to work for several years. He was busy studying computers and taking delight in doing it.

A few years later, Lao Shen was enrolled by examnation to Shandong Institute of Mining (now Shandong University of Science and Technology) for a Master’s degree of computer science. Even a professor of the institute exclaimed, “Fancying a cotton and knitting mill has such a talent...” After graduating from the institute, he stayed in school to teach. He was 37 years old that year. The young men in the same office, about 27 years old, with a PhD, would be given the priority on housing allotment and salary raizing. Pay and promotion, often by seniority in universities, were all against him. Lao Shen decided to get a PhD degree, and he was later enrolled to a university in Guangdong Province.

Now Lao Shen works in Microsoft Corp in Shanghai.

He is the first graduate student in our factory. Later, I followed them to take the postgraduate entrance examination, but failed. Looking back, I feel deeply about those days.

It reminds me of the little civil servant who is highly inconspicuous—whose net name is “Bright Moon That Year”. His colleague idled away with a cup of tea, a cigarette, and a newspaper. In their meaningless conversation, he became the object of ridicule and scorn. He was still quietly intoxicated with the appealing stories, and the ups and downs of the events. Day by day, year after year, and by the time he “Bright Moon That Year” really becomes a bright moon in the sky, the eyeglasses of his colleagues may have fallen to the ground with surprise.

This is exactly what the saying is: all those people who want to make great achievements are very low-key, but their hearts are turbulent and have the power that ordinary people are not easily aware of. Their great success always comes as a jaw-dropping surprise.