Serenity

When I was a boy, I had very good memory. For example, when I played Chinese chess with a friend of my brother, he messed up all chesses because he would lose. After that, I replaced every chess back to its right position without any consideration. I didn’t know why, but I just remembered their positions naturally. Also, I read many books in my childhood and remembered many poems, proverbs and stories.

It was pity that I didn’t realize that any function would be degenerated when it doesn’t be used for a long time. When I was a senior high school student, I hated to remember many boring things. I thought that the most important abilities were thinking and inference, so what I needed was to remember the root and how to derive everything from the root. From that moment, my ability of memorizing things was degenerating very soon. Now I can’t even remember a cell phone number.

In the beginning of noting the degenerated memory, I didn’t feel bad because I thought that the space of human's brain was limited. Therefore, we needed to clean some garbage and store more useful stuff. But when the degeneration became very serious, I knew that having bad memory was a really problem, so I retrained my memory recently. Although recalling something makes me more tired than other actions such as inference or analysis, I still try to memory stuff and recall old one. Maybe it’s my illusion, now I feel better than before. I mean, I can remember more things than before.

When we were children, we were on the road which our parents had set up. Sometimes the road is similar to others, or we can call it the road of the expectation of the society, for example, having a master or doctor degree.

When we grew up, we found there were many other choices; we didn't need to compete with the others in the narrow road. We can live with more happiness and chase what we would like to be. However, when we are closing the society, we realize that finding what we like is really hard. Sometimes living on the original road is easier and we can suffer fewer pains.

For me, I had made a decision that I wanted to live easier when I graduated from the junior high school. I chose to study in the classes not in sciences, although I was good at mathematics and sciences. I thought I needed think harder if I would study in scientific areas. However, this lazy decision was changed after entering the senior high school with a half of year.

Since I was a boy, I like rain. The sound and the scene of the rain have hundred of thousands forms. Different forms of it always bring different feeling to me. Also, the smell of the rain is so special that I am hardly to forget it.

I still remember the strong rain and wind appeared in my junior high school. That day, I saw it from the hall in my junior high school. It looked like a magic! The rain looked like a water wall which moved from the left side to the right side. In that moment, I had a desire to stand on the ground in order to feel the strength of it. It was a pity that I didn't really jump to the ground to be inside the rain. I was too preservable to live with more power.

Beside the strong rain, the small rain has its own charming. Walking in the small rain makes me feel a little loneliness but peaceful. I think it is a kind of enjoyable. Maybe it feels like something filled in my own heart and this feeling is indescribable. Or you could imagine it from the scene : A gentleman who wears in suit walks in the rain. Although he brings an umbrella but he doesn't want to open it up. He walks with varying speed casually and sings an unknown song. That is somewhat closed to my feeling.

When I was a little boy, my parents believe the slogan "Kids who have learned to play the piano will never become bad guys". They sent my older brother to learn to play the piano first, while my naughty brother was fired by the teacher because he would like to play in our grandmother's house for several weeks instead of attending the course. Think of this old thing, I have to say that people have their own characters even younger than you think.

But my parents didn't give up the hope. Maybe for the same reason or they just wanted to give it a try. You know, when your first experiment failed, you may doubt there was something wrong, and this time we could prevent some bad factors and make it. At least, the younger kid (that's me) doesn't like play in the grandmother's house as his brother does. They sent me to learn when I was 7. The teacher was our neighbor when I was 3. Of course, I didn't remember the things when we were neighbors. All that I knew was this teacher would beat me if I didn't follow her rule. What worse was my mother allowed her to do so. Therefore, my miserably and fortunate piano life had started.

In the beginning, I refused to learn. I kicked and beat the piano heavily. As soon as I did this, the teacher would beat me back with a iron rule. Maybe she would like to give me a course : how painful the piano is, or she was angry her piano was spoiled. Ummm, maybe both reason are right. I don't know when I had started to like playing piano during those painful period. For more detailed description, I neither hated it nor liked it. And I found that I had some gift for this. It's not that much gift to be a musician or a performer, but it's enough to escape lots of practice. Sometimes I only practiced one of times during a week, and when I played it to the teacher, I would get "Progress Award", which is worth 15 NT dollars. Sometimes I even practiced zero of times!

It's kind of unbelievable that I found I like writing latest. Observing the past life, I should notice this earlier.

In the junior high school time, the teacher requested us to keep a diary everyday. Also, there should be at least four lines in each diary. Sometimes I'd write some nonsense words like "Today I have nothing to write, but the teacher asks us to write four lines. I have no choice, so I write these words." Writing each word as bigger as it could be, it's a easy job to fill four lines with these blah. Fortunately, our teacher Mr. Pan is a open guy with some humor. Instead of asking me to rewrite the diary, he would give some critical and funny comment .

Because of the open mind of my teacher, I wrote more and more interesting things. During the last subsidiary course, many students would read and pass my diary joyfully. Most of them think my diary is the most interesting one. ( It's not a hard thing, since I have no competitor. No one likes to spend lots of time keeping a diary. *smile* ) Receiving these positive responses makes me write more harder. Usually I spent an hour a day finishing my diary. Sometimes I wrote even two or three diaries during the weekend. I'm glad that teacher Pen would read all my diary and give positive comments.