At the end of last year, I had a not-so-small operation. In accordance with my usual working style, I calmly asked for leave, went through the admission procedures, settled the child, calmly pushed into the operating room, and calmly pushed out of the operating room. Throughout the process, I felt that I was an independent, mature, and responsible adult.
He will be in bed for 6 hours after the operation. When I was bored, I took out my headphones and listened to music for a while. A few songs passed flatly, and suddenly there was a low guitar melody, very familiar, but I couldn't remember what song it was anyway. Before reason had time to make any response, a sour and sorrowful feeling rose from the bottom of my heart, and tears fell completely involuntarily.
Then, I heard my sobbing louder. The soul seems to leave the body, watching from a distance silently like a child, completely out of control of emotions. I heard that the nurse was frightened and kept asking me what's wrong. I heard myself saying, "My child is still young, my child is young..." I heard the old grandmother who had just had a mastectomy in the next bed comforting me, "Girl, it's okay, it's okay..."
After calming down for a long time, I realized that the song was Leslie Cheung’s "All You Can Be With You". It was the first time I left my hometown at the age of 18, and it was a song played in a loop during my journey. "Once in the distance, the snow covered the sky, the lone traveler, shrunk his shoulders..." Back then, it was probably the image of the vast snow and the lonely journey on the horizon, which coincided with the sadness of the teenager leaving home. Now, it collides with the dreamy middle-aged man who is drifting in life, like a bubble, and instantly destroys the armor that an adult has armed with for a long time.
After the operation, for a long time, I was enveloped in a kind of melancholy. I listened to old songs 30 years ago and watched old dramas 30 years ago, as if my body and mind were taken advantage of by a 13-year-old self, and I was reluctant to leave.
When I listen to Beyond’s "Broad Sea and Sky", I always think of the gray sky and low hanging clouds in the southern town in my childhood, and I think that my world was once so small and closed, as if everything is known. Only when the August typhoon season came, the huge wind, accompanied by the torrential rain, the kind of destructive natural might, made me realize that there is a bigger world outside, a mysterious universe that seems to come from the depths of time. However, now this mysterious universe seems to be telling me something through this song, "Walking thousands of miles, forgive me for my unruly and indulgent love and freedom in this life, and I will be afraid that one day I will fall..."
I listened to Leslie Cheung’s "The Wind Continues Blowing" "I will think of the thoughts of seventeen or eighteen years old. When I first arrived in a strange city, I took a dilapidated bus all the way and thought about it all the way. The wind in winter comes in from the window, just like the gust of wind sung repeatedly in the song, “The wind continues to blow, I can’t bear to stay away, I am very eager to stay with you...” Maybe it’s because I listened too much during that time. , So this song always inexplicably brings a little bit of the solemnity and coldness of the northern winter in my impression. But after hearing this song after many years, I realized that it was charming because Leslie Cheung used a kind of indifferent melancholy to sing a deep feeling of depression. How can you understand such complex emotions when you were young?
I once knew a young Englishman who graduated from a prestigious school and could be an elite in the financial world, but came to China with a guitar. He said that he likes Chinese love songs, especially the Cantonese love songs of the 90s, because there is a special affection not found in English songs. Which song is more affectionate than "The Wind Continues To Blow"?
When I listen to Wen Zhaolun's "Success", I can't help but look at the sky to see if someone is really hiding behind it. "Looking back at this life, people are like flying insects falling into the net, and all the bitterness of hatred must be endured."...Some things happen, we can only accept them as facts of life, but sometimes when we change our minds in the subconscious, we still will I was shocked, for example, I have lost my mother, and I am so old...
Psychologists say that when a person is at a turning point in life, it is especially easy to nostalgia. Nostalgia is a defensive measure of the brain that saves us from stressful situations full of anxiety and takes us to places that are considered "safe" in the subconscious mind.
I went to junior high school in 1990 and graduated from university in 2000. It was a whole 10 years. At that time, I felt that such a long time, but when I look back, it turned out to be fleeting. But thanks to the Internet, the songs and dramas I have listened to in the past 10 years can now be heard and seen again without any effort. If memory is the closest place to heaven, no matter what you lose, you can find comfort in it. Now I hide in the little heaven built by that side of memory, trying to fight the unknown world outside. Of course there are hallucinations. Kitsch, cowardice, self-deception, but also heroism.
British psychologist Donald Winnicott has a very interesting theory. He said that for a child, especially in the early stages of life, there will be a lot of fears about the outside world. Therefore, they will choose a toy as a transitional tool between their inner world and the outer world to deal with their fear, anxiety and disappointment. Just like the clever Linus in the "Peanuts" comics, he always carries a blanket with him wherever he goes. That blanket is part of the outside world, but because he has absolute control and ownership over it, it seems to be part of himself, which makes him feel safe.
It is not easy for a person to strive to maintain a clear boundary between the internal world and the external world throughout his life. Therefore, we adults also need a blanket that allows occasional self-indulgence, playfulness and craziness.
So, those old songs, for me, are probably Linus' blanket. They once reminded me when I was a teenager that people can live a more vivid, interesting, and open life; the world can have another appearance, another order, and another possibility. But now, through them, I am eager to go back to the past, a safer, more stable, more self-sufficient world, more love, more kindness, more freedom, and less responsibility. At that time, I believe that no matter how sad the fairy tale will have a happy ending.
