Before and after

Fan Zhongyan was asked to write a commemorative essay about the Yueyang Tower, which had been rebuilt. He had never been there. He wrote it anyway, from descriptions and from what he knew about the landscapes of the region.

The essay does what these essays do: it praises the view, describes how the tower looks in two different weathers. On grey and windy days the travellers think about their own smallness and their exile; on bright days the lake is a sheet of gold and they forget they were ever sad.

Then he says the difference was never in the place. It's in the people standing on the tower. The ones who are steady in both weathers are not the ones who have never been sad. They're the ones whose mood is not being decided by the lake.

The famous line, and I'm paraphrasing rather than translating, is that a person of real substance worries before the world worries and is happy after the world is happy.

I want to be honest about the part that doesn't work for me. "Worry before the world worries, be happy after" as a life policy can become a machine for never being allowed to enjoy anything.

What does hold up is the earlier bit. The two weathers are the same place. Your reading of your situation will change with the light, and the skill is knowing that the lake isn't doing it.

This week, if something looks worse than it did last week, ask whether the lake changed or the weather did.

MOJOWAY asks whether the lake changed or the weather did, in one line a week.