#all your new habits rely on knowing you can't expect better. and then you suddenly can? disorienting

[lindwurmkai]

not to make an overly personal mysterious lotus casebook post again, but i think i understand what li lianhua has been doing these past ten years.

when you've been sick for a long time and it only ever seems to get worse instead of better, you stop having goals and dreams. you don't know what your health is going to be like a year from now, much less five years from now, so what's the point in planning ahead? li lianhua experienced an even worse and basically instantaneous version of this because he knew for a fact he was dying.

aside from searching for shan gudao's body, which was more of a guilt-driven obsession he couldn't let go of, he didn't have any big goals or long-term plans. but here's what you can do in that situation: you look at your current life and ask yourself, "which aspects of this could i improve slightly?" and then you do that. and maybe you find that you enjoy growing vegetables.

my favourite part of lianhua lou is the lotus tower itself. li lianhua built himself a home (portable, the better to search for shan gudao's remains perhaps? or just to escape being exposed as a fraud), he carved out a life for himself despite knowing his time was limited, he got himself a dog. these are not the actions of someone who has no will to live left.

but he didn't make friends because he knew he would only hurt them by leaving them in the end. he looked at his new limitations, some of them caused by the poison and others self-imposed, and said, "okay, i can't do anything about these, but i can learn to cook."

eventually, you're so used to the limitations that every little achievement starts to feel very satisfying. it may not be as exciting as having grand aspirations, but there is a kind of peace to be found in that lack of excitement, too. (this is what di feisheng understands the least. this is probably also what fang duobing understands the least.)

the grief is relentless, but he thinks he deserves it, so he doesn't try to change that part and focuses on other things. small things. and it turns out this kind of life is not all bad.

what would happen if he suddenly got healed? if half the limitations suddenly disappeared, or even all of them?

#i don't have an answer to that question #it may depend on just how long it's been since you made peace with your new life #but the thing is it's not going to be a smooth ride #all your new habits rely on knowing you can't expect better. and then you suddenly can? disorienting #mysterious lotus casebook #mlc #ETA: just looked in the tag and i would like to state for the record that i was unaware of the post i seem to be directly contradicting 😳