The pool that was never theirs

Liu Zongyuan was exiled to Yongzhou after a failed reform. The most productive years of his public life were spent in a place he had not chosen.

He walked in the mountains a lot, and one day found a small rocky pool, with a hundred fish in it, all idling as if drifting in air. He wrote about sunlight on the stones, the fish not moving when people approached, the pleasure of sitting by the water.

Then, at the end: the place was too quiet and too cold to stay long, so he noted the scene and left.

He wrote down that line as a small aside, and Chinese readers have remembered it for twelve hundred years. Everybody who reads it notices the same thing: his clearest happiness didn't hold.

I've had this in my own life and probably you have too. A friendship that was perfect in a particular year that didn't survive the year ending. A job that gave you three months of complete absorption. The mistake is expecting those to become permanent structures, and then grieving as if something broke.

The pool was real. The fish were really there. It wasn't the right temperature for a residence.

Some things you don't get to keep, only to visit, and a life with no visits isn't more durable, it's just smaller.

MOJOWAY is for noting the visits you do not get to keep, because a record of them is a different kind of durability.