Now when I look back to my summer, I can think of quiet a few things to tell and they are mostly related to the tasks I completed during this period of time. But as it’s supposed to be a narration and just listing them down here would not do, I will simply pick those moments worthy of sharing.

Dating back to the winter two years ago, I had never realized how touching that particular melancholy beauty one can find in the classical Chinese art, and after picking this treasure up again, I fell in love with it and obliged myself to take the responsibility to stage our enchanting classical culture in front of the best educated audience in the UK when I was attending Cambridge summer school.

While without realizing the fact that something lying so deep inside the culture cannot be understood that easily especially by a hasty public, I failed the final presentation and also the only chance to get a scholarship, the only chance to get recognition from Cambridge at that time.

Back then I thought I was prepared and excited to win. So when I failed, the failure felt unacceptable to me. I got so depressed that I came over to the French professor who was in charge of the whole project and gathered all my courage to tell him about my dream in his own language, French, and then, I earned myself a designated favor at a later day from a French director at the Language Center of Cambridge. While before all those things happened, I had never expected my French Professor could do me any practical favors.

So here is the first lesson I was taught this summer, just as that saying in Forest Gump, that life is just like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get, but when you have the conviction of your dreams, it can sweeten up.

After coming back from the UK,I took over the job of leading my team members in order to finish two reports on two different programs for which I wrote five analytic essays later, so to some extent, I spent the whole summer working and every time I had the chance to make a dash for the supermarket, I  felt happier than a kid opening a Christmas gift. If we can say that the material aspect is not enough, but still vital in bringing us real happiness, then it’s quite a humble way to discover the beauty of life in rows upon rows of goods on display. How odd in fact,  and this is how I came to understand another life lesson, a truth which I once knew that what makes life worth living is not the finished task, but the magic though the weak links between us. Because even when I was just looking at the goods, I thought of the people using them in their lives, I thought of the happiness and stories they may have. And my imagination of these stories, I didn’t know whether they were true or not, made me feel jollier, holding all the possible warmth in this world.

After this, I made the decision to stop worrying so much about work, finding out that my best friend became progressively alienated from me. So that day we had an afternoon like the one we had when we met each other for the first time. It was warm and filled with true emotions and then I knew my friend was back.

I can best portray loneliness as a woman wandering alone in the darkness, with the glittering and sophisticated nights of London all around her. For a very long time, when I felt lonely, seeing myself as that person wandering alone in a foreign town, yet I denied it. I denied that image and told myself, no, this is a glorious city. And by doing this, I denied a fact that there was always someone in my heart, who made me think of a warm and bright home in a cold silent night. And that’s exactly what empowered me in those dark and bitter moments.

So here is the final and the most important lesson. Never forget that love is the most important thing in life. Don’t deny it and don’t forget it.

 (Edited by Diana & Sijia Hu)