Last day in Taiwan today! So this last post will be about something I found in Taiwan. It's found in other places too (California), but it's just interesting:
This is a 曇花 (tan hua for the Chinese impaired). My grandparents grow them. It is an interesting flower: It blooms only at night, and that flower dies in approximately eight hours after it does so. So for perhaps three days in the year, for eight hours a day, a nice looking flower blooms. Is it worth the work of raising this plant all year? Maybe, maybe not. But it's like the rest of your life.
The Chinese have a saying (courtesy of Wikipedia), 曇花一現, that talks about a person being famous for a short time. It says that that person's fame lasted only as long as that flower. I take it more as any good time only lasting a short time. Also, considering you have to take care of the flower for the whole year before you can get that short time on beauty, it also involves working very hard for that fame. But, isn't that like most peoples lives?
Most people just want to do something with their lives: to make a difference on the world, make themselves famous, something. They spend their lives working for that single moment when they say that they could have made a difference or made themselves famous. Even if for that single moment, they will have felt happy, no matter what they had to go through for that time. As such is the flower, which one works so hard to grow, simply for it to die after eight hours.
I'll just leave this post as it is, and let you think about the flower. Whatever your goal is, as long as the flower at the end is beautiful enough, strive toward it; grow the plant. I am signing off in Taiwan, and my next post will be from California. See you all!
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