The day at the Orchid Pavilion

In the spring of 353, Wang Xizhi and forty-one friends gathered at a pavilion in the mountains of Shaoxing. They sat by a winding stream with wine cups floating past, wrote poems, and drank. The weather was clear, the air was mild, and he wrote that looking out over the wide world filled him with wonder.

Then, in the same piece, he turns.

He notices that the pleasure of the day was already becoming a memory while it happened. That what moves us is always slipping. That people's lives are short, and the things they're proud of will be forgotten, and that he cannot stop the way his heart aches when he thinks about it.

He adds that he can't write his way out of this, and that anyone reading a thousand years later will probably feel the same thing.

Every schoolchild in China has copied this text as calligraphy practice. It's famous partly because it was written in one sitting, at a party, with a slightly drunken hand.

The version I keep coming back to is the honesty about the ending. He didn't write the piece so the afternoon would last. He wrote it because the afternoon was going to end, and he wanted to look at it while it was still happening.

Whatever your version of that afternoon is, it's happening this month, and nobody has yet invented a way to keep it.

MOJOWAY is a place to keep the record instead. The day will end anyway. Writing down what it was, in your own words, is the only part that lasts.