The Wall of Sighs

(1)

pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. — Anonymous

I hadn’t run seriously in a long time. After returning from China, my belly had gained a ring. After some painful reflection, I ran a half marathon two weeks in a row. Last year, running 20-plus kilometers without food or water was no great feat; it was just seven carefree laps around the scenic two-mile loop at Lake Elizabeth (a small lake in Fremont, in the Bay Area). But this year, age, weight gain, and a chaotic schedule have pulled me into what Professor Tal—a lecturer in Harvard’s Positive Psychology course—calls a downward spiral. My fitness has been quietly sliding, lap by lap, and recently hit bottom: I successfully brought my marathon wall forward from 30-plus kilometers to 17 km…

Anyone who has run a marathon, or is training for one, knows that ‘hitting the wall’ feeling: you’re running along, and suddenly you’re out of fuel, your muscles fail, your legs turn to jelly. It is like sleep paralysis—your mind flails desperately, but your hands and feet are on a different channel and simply will not obey. You feel your pace fall off a cliff, yet you have no idea what to do. Were it not for holding on to one belief, taking a breath, gritting your teeth, and using sheer willpower to keep your body from stopping, you would probably collapse beneath that sighing wall.

The internal battle at the wall is both painful and strangely fascinating. Haruki Murakami describes it as ‘feeling like a piece of beef moving painfully through a meat grinder,’ which conveys the pain; yet he also serves up a bowl of chicken soup for it: pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. When your body hits the wall, two voices inevitably surface in your head. One is like Auntie Lin Chiling’s gentle, seductive tone pouring sweet nothings into your ear: ‘The finish line is just five meters ahead.’ The other is resolute and impassioned, booming like North Korean state TV: ‘A scholar must be resolute and broad-minded, for the burden is heavy and the road is long. Please, for world peace, hold on for another 17 km.’ As a non-Party member and non-cadre, in that wall period when my body desperately craves ‘blood sugar’ rather than hot-blooded courage, being able to throw the gentle ‘sugar-coated bomb’ to the ground, stomp on it three times, spit on it twice, and keep going truly requires courage.

The reason I call it fascinating is that it offers an experience no other human activity can provide continuously and gently: the feeling of pushing yourself to a certain limit. Note that I say it cannot be experienced ‘continuously and gently,’ not that it cannot be experienced at all. Most other limit-pushing experiences cannot be sustained: you cannot chew magic mushrooms every day, nor can you go skydiving whenever you please, let alone climb high-altitude peaks unprepared. Running, by contrast, is something you can do every day. If you are willing, it takes only three to five hours to slowly squeeze the surplus energy out of your body, run until you hit the wall, and feel that limit. This limit will not send you floating in bliss (magic mushrooms), nor make you drift beyond the three realms and five elements (skydiving); instead, it gives you the possibility of veni, vidi, vici. After you hit the wall, your body begins to betray your mind. Relying on powerful willpower, you suppress this betrayal, move your legs numbly like a robot, and run as far as remains. Finally, in the fierce wrestling match between betrayal and counter-betrayal, that strange and mysterious philosophical assertion—‘quantity changes into quality’—suddenly comes true. Your whole person is like Tanya after leveling up in Red Alert: your doddery steps suddenly become Lingbo Weibu, weightless and gliding.

Look at Goku in Dragon Ball: on the way to Namek, he tortured himself to the brink of death again and again; once he survived each ordeal, his power level rose another notch. Same principle.

(2)

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire; the other is to gain it. — George Bernard Shaw

Hitting the wall doesn’t happen only during long runs. It shows up in any social practice that lasts long enough. A couple’s honeymoon-phase sweetness and vows of eternal love prove nothing. After three months of dating, take a trip together, and you’ll discover that you dislike her pickiness about people and things, while she can’t stand your programmer’s sense of humor, which hovers near absolute zero. Your relationship begins to hit the wall. Even if you make it to marriage—anyone who’s been there knows that after marriage comes the seven-year itch. The itch is merely one expression of hitting the wall; whether you can cross it safely still depends on both sides’ effort and tolerance under a shared goal.

Work, too, often has a ‘wall period.’ A fresh job is like a new lover: in the early days of acquaintance, both sides show each other their best knowledge and best table manners. But after you stay a while—often at around the one-year mark—everything at the company starts to look wrong. The Qiuxiang who once seemed to glance back with a smile of a hundred charms now takes off her heavy makeup, loses the beauty filter, and is revealed as a nose-picking Ruhua: this colleague looks like an idiot, that boss is trash; the company’s code is a pile of shit, and your daily work is like dealing with flies in a cesspit.

This is the wall in a career. It is not as obvious as the wall in running; nor, likewise, do you have a clear goal and ample motivation to break through it. When running—whether a half marathon, full marathon, or ultramarathon—your goal is reduced to a number, and when you hit the wall you can calculate exactly how far you are from that goal, which is another number. You can further break that number into smaller numbers: if there are 17 km left to the finish, you simply need to hold on for seventeen 1-km stretches. You wage war against your body with willpower; each kilometer you pass, you give yourself a small reward, perhaps even high-five a roadside /(美女|帅哥)*/ volunteer, and both spiritual and material civilization are satisfied. That is why male and female badasses in running can still defeat themselves after hitting the wall—they have a SMART goal.

But the wall in a career—or at work—is different. At first you may be drawn in by a noble and attractive vision, and you become filled with ambition, wishing you were the great Peng bird soaring ninety thousand li on the wind. Later obstacles multiply, enthusiasm fades, and the vision loses its appeal. At that point it is hard to say what your goal in this job is besides money. You begin to despair and quietly leave. People who voluntarily quit a job in under a year are basically in this state.

This is a very harmful state. In my experience over the past year, I have seen many résumés showing more than three or five jobs in the past three to five years. These résumés make one sigh. Clearly, their owners hit the wall again and again, then retreated again and again. Professor Randy Pausch said: ‘The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.’

The question is: what the hell is this something? Or, more precisely, in my current boring job, what exactly is the something I ‘badly want’?

Only when this question is answered clearly can we even talk about crossing the wall at work, or in a career. This something can be a title, the completion of a project, or financial gain. We need to do what we do in running: make the problem concrete, turn it into a goal, and then divide and conquer. In this way, we can enjoy the scenery on the other side of the wall—scenery that may be reserved for the few, because most people are stopped on this side of the wall and cannot take this step.

Recently, quite a few young people in my WeChat public account who want to start businesses have asked me whether this is the moment—with winter coming—to do so. I tell them: don’t start a business yet. First, run for a month, with a half marathon as the minimum and a full marathon as the goal. Find out what hitting the wall feels like, and see whether you can push through it. If you can’t, why would you believe you can become the proud plum blossom that ‘blooms alone in the freezing cold’ in this ‘winter’? Better to honestly temper your mind in a big company first.