Have or HappyWhen Yanhui, one of Confucius’s students, died, Confucius could not help praising him: ”Great, Yanhui. A bowl of rice, a bottle of water, living in the nasty place, people worry too much about his hardship, Yanhui, however,did not change his happy mood. Great Yanhui （賢哉，回也，一簞食，一瓢飲，在陋巷。 人不堪其憂，回也不改其樂。賢哉，回也。）” Today, when we read the essay from Confucius Anthology, most of us can’t understand what’s the point of praising a life like this.
Our lives have been changed dramatically in two thousand years. We begin our day with high calcium milk and high protein bread. Wearing designed clothes, we rush to our office by car. Sitting in the air-conditioning room, we don’t need worry about the weather at all. At the noon we flood into romantic KFC. After that, we get back to our office by elevator, staying there till the last minute of our 8 hours’ working time. When we get home in the evening, we know what happened in the world through TV as we have our delicious meal. Finally, we take a hot bath before ending our day life.
No doubt, our life is much better than Yanhui’s. Nevertheless, there’s no free lunch in the word. While we are relishing modern life, someone has to pay for it. Thus we work for eight hours a day for five days a week for over thirty years. Modern life, to some extent, likes drug: Once you taste it, you can’t get rid of it. The more we enjoy modern life, the more we think we can’t live without it. Little by little, we become, unconsciously, the prisoner of the world. And our happiness has directly, like it or not, linked with our wealth. The problem is whether we are happier than Yanhui since we got more comfortable life and more assets than him.
The answer, in my eyes, is no. Our happiness has heavily relied on our assets; Yanhui, on the other hand, decides his happiness by his mind. Ironically, he is a genius free man and bourgeoisie according to modern life guide book: He can go wherever he likes though he has no car; he has a lot of free time doing whatever he wants as no one supervises his job; since his life is simple, he has a happy life without worrying about being laid off; furthermore, he has no fear of mad cow disease at all as he can’t sit in Mcdonald!!! His spirit awards happiness for him while we think our happiness is given by the world. Laughing at Yanhui’s free austere life, we coop ourselves in the golden cage.
I don’t mean here to criticize the comfort of modern life. I just want to indicate that our happiness is not based on our property but our mind. I pretty appreciate what Zhuan, living in the same era of Confucius, said: Make use of things and don’t be used by things(物物而不物於物).