Go Where Your Heart Leads
Lately I’ve been obsessed with a Bilibili series called “Xu Yun Roaming China.” The creator posts roughly every two days, documenting his life as a drifter cycling across China and living off the land.
Xu Yun grew up in the countryside. He hasn’t held a job in two years. He travels with a bicycle, a tent, a sleeping bag, a windbreak, a foam pad, a folding wood-burning stove, a lighter, a pressure cooker, and a power bank with his phone and action camera. He’s ridden to the Sichuan highlands at 5,000 meters elevation and to the northeastern borderlands at minus 30 degrees Celsius.
Every day he cycles in the wild, avoiding crowds, wandering through nature. At night he pitches his tent alone under bridges, beside roads, in gullies, or in abandoned buildings — which he considers five-star accommodation. Almost every dinner involves gathering firewood, making a fire, and cooking from scratch. He barely sets foot in cities except to resupply.
Nearly half of each video is him chatting to the camera while he cooks. For him, it’s an asynchronous record of connection; for us, he becomes our eyes into the world.
When I recommended the videos to friends, they struggled to understand why anyone would choose this life. The comments online are a mix of encouragement, skepticism, sympathy, and gentle warnings.
In one episode, Xu Yun answered: “But the road is there, and you have to keep going.”
This reminded me of Liu Cixin’s short story The Mountain. The protagonist is obsessed with climbing, and his answer is: “We climb the mountain because it is there.”
The underground civilization in the story also mirrors humanity’s history of exploration — generation after generation venturing out into the unknown. Curiosity or the desire to conquer, it doesn’t matter: because it is there, they must go. And through the accumulated sacrifice of explorers across generations, the civilization’s Gagarin finally escapes the lightless core to see a brilliant sky full of stars.
If your heart points somewhere, why not go? Even if it feels like a dream?
Back in high school, I read Those Things in Ming Dynasty (Ming Chao Na Xie Shi Er). Beyond the big names — Wang Yangming, Hai Rui, Zhang Juzheng, Yu Qian — there was one person who quietly moved me the most: Xu Xiake. At the very end of the seven-volume saga, the author used Xu Xiake’s story to close the entire work. It’s one of the most beautifully written passages I’ve read. I’d encourage anyone to revisit it when they have time.
The author spent all those volumes recounting the rise and fall of a dynasty — emperors and generals, power and ruin — and chose to end with the story of a man who simply traveled. Why?
Before this, I have spoken of many things — rise and fall, lords and kings, the helpless turning of fate, the shifting winds. But this thing, in my personal view, is the most important of all.
Because I want to tell you: all those great enterprises, all that eternal fame — it’s compost. First it becomes dung, then it becomes dirt.
You may not understand this now. You will understand it later. If you still don’t understand later, wait longer. If you never understand in your entire life — that’s fine too.
But this last thing I want to say, it surpasses all of the above, at least in my view.
Yet this thing, no matter how long I thought about it, I could not find the right words or phrases to express it — in the most annoying terms, it’s something you feel but cannot say.
Still, I am not the type to annoy people. After exhausting all my books and finding no way to begin, I finally found the right words in an unremarkable, seemingly worthless little item.
It was a desk calendar — sitting right in front of me, untouched for who knows how long, long past its expiration date.
I believe heaven placed this calendar on my desk. It watched my years of effort and unbroken persistence, and quietly, patiently, it waited for the end.
It waited. And on the last day before it would end, I finally opened it — this companion that had been with me all along, that I had never once opened — and there, on its pages, was the final answer.
I opened it, and there on that calendar was a quote from a famous person whose name wasn’t even clearly identified.
Yes. This is what I wanted to say. This is what I wanted to express through Xu Xiake — the most perfect closing words, enough to make all kings and heroes look small:
There is only one definition of success: to live life on your own terms.
The Xu Xiake Travels contain the line: “On the fourth day, I sat quietly all day listening to the sound of melting snow.”
I stopped to ask myself: what was I doing on the fourth day of this month? Racing after wealth and status? Worn out by family obligations? Anxious about work? Meanwhile, Xu Xiake sat at the summit of Huangshan and listened to snow melt for an entire day.
Xu Xiake didn’t travel because he intended to write the Xu Xiake Travels. Xin Qiji didn’t fight to save the country because he intended to compile his Jiaxuan Poetry Collection.
We need to love life itself — not what life is “for.” As Wang Xiaobo said: “I came into this world not to multiply. I came to see how flowers bloom and rivers flow. How the sun rises and where the sunset goes. I live in this world for nothing more than to understand a few things and meet a few interesting ones. Life is an accident, and within it I search for cause and effect.”
There’s a song I’ve been loving called “A Traveler Passing Through the World.” The lyrics trace a traveler’s encounters and feelings, and end with the line: “That is you — the mark that proves you once existed as a human being.” Life has no inherent meaning; all we have is “a string of fleeting moments,” and those are the traces of our existence.
What matters most in this life is the experience, the feeling — to embrace the beautiful, to live the life you want.
I’ll close with something a Pixar designer I admire said in an interview: “Success is not defined by what’s outside you. It’s whether you’re living the way you want to live.”
Float through the world, soul aglow.
Go where your heart leads, with unhurried steps.
This Month’s Log
- Finished: K-Drama | Reborn Rich | ★★★☆☆
- Watching: J-Drama | Nagi’s Long Vacation | ★★★★☆
- Watching: Anime | Three-Body | ★★☆☆☆
- Playing: Switch | Persona 5 Royal | ★★★★★
Reborn Rich is a standard power-fantasy isekai setup — started strong, trailed off (though “starting strong” might be generous). Three stars overall. Swapping the leads might have helped; almost all the acting was carried by the grandfather. Looking forward to seeing the finale tonight.
Nagi’s Long Vacation — still watching. Not loving the forced rehabilitation arc; the writers try to trace genuine harm done to others back to a personal character flaw, which feels like a stretch. That said, I do enjoy the quiet, slice-of-life warmth of Japanese dramas.
Three-Body (animated) — a single word: disappointing. Gave up after episode four. Many problems, but I’ll leave critique aside and give it this: the marketing team did a fantastic job.
