To be a frog or to be a toad: chatting about parenting and growing up with a fading romance

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The fol­low­ing is a quote from Fad­ing Romance post­ed on 2010–3‑15 22:27:09:
 
To be a frog or to be a toad, that is the ques­tion
Author: Fad­ed Romance
   
I final­ly heard Ajia read­ing a pic­ture book in per­son. Before March 2010, I nev­er thought that I would be able to attend the read­ing club of the Inspec­tor and Ajia in Hefei. It turns out that the world can be so won­der­ful.
   
Before this, I had nev­er seen the sto­ry of the frog and the toad from a par­en­t’s per­spec­tive, but after lis­ten­ing to Aji­a’s sto­ry, I sud­den­ly real­ized, “So that’s how it is.” It seems that I still have a long way to go in my cul­ti­va­tion.
   
How­ev­er, in recent years, I’ve been increas­ing­ly pon­der­ing the ques­tion of whether par­ents are frogs or toads. I’ve read about many cas­es where par­ents do noth­ing, yet their chil­dren thrive; and many cas­es where par­ents do a lot, yet their chil­dren don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly thrive. The rea­sons for this are far from being sim­ply explained by genes or envi­ron­ment, nor by a blan­ket expla­na­tion of both. Just like the mas­tery of any field, the ori­gin of their skill is often explained by a care­ful exam­i­na­tion of fate. While for­mu­las can cer­tain­ly be con­struct­ed, com­bin­ing numer­ous fac­tors, it’s not sim­ply a mat­ter of adding them togeth­er. I remem­ber read­ing this quote some­where: “Life is what hap­pens out­side your plans.” There­fore, I think we can relax about our chil­dren’s affairs.
   
Even if par­ents under­stand this prin­ci­ple per­fect­ly, they will inevitably do some­thing. Why do I feel more and more like Sisy­phus the more I talk about it? Haha, stop it.
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Re: To be a frog or to be a toad, that is the ques­tion
Author: Ajia
 
   
Haha, things are so strange­ly serendip­i­tous. I did­n’t expect that the base of this trip in Hefei would be the pri­ma­ry school where your daugh­ter attends. What’s even more coin­ci­den­tal is that we had an appoint­ment in the first half of last year but did­n’t keep it, but went this year instead :)
 
   
I might go again this year, and maybe even repeat­ed­ly. How it will pan out is still unknown, so I’ll just have to let nature take its course.
 
   
I often keep “Frog and Toad” on my bed­side book­shelf, flip­ping through it from time to time. Each time I read it, I expe­ri­ence a dif­fer­ent feel­ing, and shar­ing it with dif­fer­ent friends brings me a dif­fer­ent reward. Hong­ni­ba often vis­its Run­sheng Gar­den in Bei­jing, a veg­etable gar­den ded­i­cat­ed to organ­ic eco­log­i­cal agri­cul­ture research. The own­er, a Bud­dhist layper­son and a sci­en­tif­ic expert spe­cial­iz­ing in avi­a­tion mate­ri­als and con­tribut­ing to the devel­op­ment of author­i­ta­tive text­books, spends his week­ends and free time tend­ing to the gar­den. Their son is a year or two old­er than Xiaoyin. Read­ing the sto­ry of “The Gar­den” brought a dif­fer­ent kind of insight to him. He told me that West­ern eco­log­i­cal agri­cul­ture researchers, through repeat­ed exper­i­ments, have dis­cov­ered that it is pos­si­ble for peo­ple to con­nect emo­tion­al­ly with the land and crops. In oth­er words, when peo­ple invest more gen­uine emo­tions in the land and crops, the yield and qual­i­ty of the crops sig­nif­i­cant­ly improve. Is this true?
 
  
On the oth­er hand, I was think­ing that the cur­rent agri­cul­tur­al struc­ture has grad­u­al­ly sev­ered the rela­tion­ship between farm­ers and the land. Peo­ple are only using the land for a short peri­od of time, and they real­ly don’t have a deep affec­tion for the land. In non-nat­ur­al aspects, crop yields main­ly rely on indus­tri­al prod­ucts — pes­ti­cides and fer­til­iz­ers. In the long run, will human beings real­ly become hap­pi­er and hap­pi­er?
 
   
So, at least there is always a part of me that believes (or strong­ly hopes) that the toad light­ing can­dles for the seeds, read­ing books, recit­ing poems, play­ing the violin…is not com­plete­ly in vain!
 
   
Fur­ther­more, a “Sisy­phus” like the toad is actu­al­ly quite hap­py! Even if the things he did for the seeds were use­less to their growth, in the process, he him­self grew, and his life was enriched and improved.
 
   
So the most amus­ing part is the last sen­tence: Grow­ing a gar­den is tru­ly exhaust­ing! — The toad­’s inno­cence is utter­ly endear­ing; if we use it as a mir­ror to reflect our­selves, we real­ize we’re just as endear­ing! — If we sim­ply shift our focus, and light can­dles and read in the gar­den at night, recite poet­ry under an umbrel­la in the rain, play the vio­lin and sing to the nat­ur­al world, not to stim­u­late the growth of seeds but sim­ply for the romance of life, then how can we lament the exhaus­tion of life?
 
   
After fur­ther com­par­i­son and ver­i­fi­ca­tion with “The Art of Love” and var­i­ous life expe­ri­ences, my recent under­stand­ing is that whether it is par­ent­ing, love and mar­riage, or every­thing in the world, if viewed from the per­spec­tive of art or skill, the essence of it can prob­a­bly still be summed up in these few words: be your­self.
 
   
Frogs are like me, toads are like me, tired­ness is fine, annoy­ance is fine. Annoy­ance is exis­tence.
 
On the morn­ing of March 16, 2010,
 
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