Another New Year Is Here. How Do You Make Time Slow Down?

Another new year is here, and tomorrow I'm heading home too.

Ever since I graduated from college and started working, time has seemed to fly. In the blink of an eye, several new years have come and gone.

It seems that every time the New Year's Eve dinner comes around, there's a voice in my head: it's New Year again. I can even remember what dishes we had at last year's dinner and what we talked about.

Why is that?

When I really pay attention to time passing, I always get the same feeling: from the moment I got my diploma and walked out of school to this moment right now, it's as if someone hit the skip button.

I can easily recall one day in college when I was playing cards in Lao Peng's dorm, a game of three-card poker, and I'd lost every piece of clothing I had on. In the end I took off my underwear, slapped it on the table, and said I was all in on this hand.

But if you ask me what I've been through in these few years of working, I can only seem to come up with things that are vague and fairly abstract. I can say I've changed a lot and grown a lot, but I no longer remember most of the specific things that happened along the way.

Maybe that's the problem. When we stop feeling the specific details of life, time slips by so fast it practically skips.

Today at home I thought about it. I'm 24 this year. Sounds young, right? But at my age I've already worked at one company for almost four years. By the time my current employment contract runs out, I'll have worked there for a full six years, and two thirds of those six years are already gone. How far off can the last third be?

Time really doesn't hold up to close inspection. A while ago Boss Quan asked me if I'd ever thought about making money from writing. I said that if I answered no, I'd sound a bit holier-than-thou. At the very least, I signed up for WeChat's ad revenue program the moment I was eligible.

I don't have many thoughts beyond that. Boss Quan asked what keeps me posting now. I said it's that I have lots of time and that strangers are reading my articles. If I had a strong urge to monetize, I'd be miserable every time it didn't pay off.

Really, writing is a happy thing in itself, nothing more. From graduating college to the fourth quarter of last year, I only wrote things on and off. I never thought about posting every day. But after I met Liang Mouyin and got the idea of posting daily, I've kept it up until now.

Couldn't I have posted every day before? Of course I could. So why did I never even think about it? What did I do with all my free time over all those years?

When I think about that, I feel that whether I can make money is the least important thing. Being able to keep writing is what's worth thinking about. I really regret it now. I regret not sticking with writing all these years. I feel I wasted a lot of the limited life I have.

At least now that I post daily, I'll remember that I wrote an article every single day. Writing is sometimes happy, sometimes exciting, sometimes something I'm itching to try, sometimes stressful. It comes with vivid feelings while I'm doing it, so I remember it pretty clearly. That way, when the year ends, I won't have that feeling of the new year suddenly appearing out of nowhere, because I remember how I felt writing on every one of those days.

So if I hadn't met Liang Mouyin a few months ago and joined Between the Lines, what would I be doing now? I'm not really sure. Maybe the same as before, wasting time on things I'm not excited about. So I'm not worried at all about whether I'll ever make money from writing. What I feel more is regret that I didn't start writing a lot sooner, because this is something I'm truly passionate about.

So to make the new year come more slowly, we should add more feeling and detail to our lives, so the year holds more things that make us happy the moment we think of them at the start of the next one.

Recording is the best proof of being alive. For me, writing is one kind of recording. At the end of last year, I set myself a goal of posting 330 articles on my Official Account this year. Thinking about it now, that's just silly. I need to change it to 365. I'm going to post every day. Unless the global internet goes down or the universe is destroyed, nothing in this world should be able to stop me from posting every day.

At the same time, I've started to love taking photos of myself. I used to love photography, shooting landscapes and taking pictures of other people, but I never liked taking pictures of myself. Now I've slowly started taking more photos of myself, and not just selfies. I've started asking other people to take photos of me too, recording how I interact with my surroundings and the world.

Back when I took photos of other people all the time, most of them were camera-shy. In front of the lens they didn't know what to do with their hands and were stiff all over. I think that happens because most people have twisted the meaning of recording in their minds.

Take my writing and photography. A lot of people think writing is a very serious business: the moment you put pen to paper, you have to produce a masterpiece that would knock out Lu Xun. But writing may be the simplest way to record things in the world today, because even if you write down one word, that counts as recording. As for whether it's good or not, that's really an unnecessary worry. What I need to worry about has never been whether I write well. It's whether what I write is really me.

Is anything more important than being really me? If I can't write like Lu Xun, am I supposed to put down my pen in misery? Can anyone else write articles like Xiluluke's?

Photography is the same. Taking photos to record things has never been a serious business. We don't need to straighten our clothes, find our angle, and stand up straight facing the camera. We don't need a photo where everyone praises your looks, your figure, or your pose. We just need a photo that, when you happen to see it someday, brings back what you were doing then and how you felt. That's enough.

Another new year is here. Time really flies .

How do we make time go a little slower?

Keep recording, and fill our past with more specific memories.

Happy Spring Festival. I wish all my readers a smooth trip home.

Most of all, good health, and happy new year.