Chiobu not the crazy ambitious young person anymore and never dream big things. Just want peace but even that seems unattainable.
"Life" is not a single property.
it can simultaneously be a professional role, unresolved questions from childhood, habits built over decades, a spark of thought ignited at night, responsibility to family, a appreciation for comfort, and the occasional flicker of quiet defiance.
these things dont necessarily derive from one another.
Nor do they need to.
Peace is not a conserved quantity. (I'm referencing to physics, a conserved quantity means that the total amount remains constant; if it decreases in one place, it must increase somewhere else.) Peach doesn't work like that.
Peace is a way of being lived out across multiple layers, all at once.
When you're young, you might look at this and call it being ground down by life.
As you grow older, it feels much closer to this: This is life itself.
What is truly successful is not living every day like a legend.
The phrase "庸庸碌碌" too easily writes off tranquility as failure.
Yet on a historical scale, for an ordinary person in a time of peace to not have to scramble daily for survival to have the luxury of being annoyed by a friends, as well as the luxury of contemplating the universe, this kind of life is itself what generations could only dream of.
So rather than saying:
"fine! I guess this is just who I am.
I don't have stamina to see through the rest of what's upcoming for me already"
It is better to say:
"So as it turns out, this, too, is wonderful."
Not an abandonment of ambition, nor self-consolation.
Just finally no longer demanding that every layer of life must prove its worth to the others
