The tiles drifted away

 　　Like the emotions of people and the memories of a city, we don't give up. We still pick up pebbles and tiles, releasing our passion in a watery world of our hearts. This achieves a higher level of life, like terraced fields.

　　As a child, standing by the river, I would pick up a tile and compete with my friends to skip stones, seeing who could skip the farthest and skip the most. Gradually, my mood became as beautiful as the skipping stones. The tiles flew and jumped across the water, the beauty of their strength and power seemingly reaching the horizon. And look at those ripples, each one greedy, each wanting to expand its territory, so they become intertwined, absolutely stunning.

　　The winding, vivid riverbanks of my hometown are now only faintly visible in the branches of my memory. In that best-preserved memory, I was completely fascinated, even unable to extricate myself from the journey of the tiles. Now, as I toss tiles into my personal and rural memories in different ways, a friend writes, lamenting that his once ancient garden-like city is now covered by neon lights and tinted glass. The leisurely tiles are drifting away with the wind at an astonishing speed, just as the city before my friend is both strange and familiar. Listening to the tiles splashing on the water, watching them fly by and create ripples before fading away, is itself a posture towards life. Selecting

　　, tossing, watching, listening… the sound is like a knife, piercing the water's surface, reminding me of the city, reminding me of the wilderness surrounding my soul. An archaeologist, riding a bus, was suddenly stopped, and the bag of tiles he was carrying bumped into a fashionable woman in front of him. The woman, eyes wide with anger, scolded, "Look at you!" The archaeologist retorted, "This isn't behavior, it's the inertia of the tiles!" A witty remark! The inertia of ancient tiles striking a fashionable modern woman—this seemingly nonsensical statement is both endearing and temperamental.

　　Survival is spatial, a space within which all sorts of collisions occur. My personal memories and feelings about the stream in my hometown, resurrected in every stone, tile, blade of grass, and tree neglected in my childhood, cannot be fully expressed in just a few words. Human life activities always unfold within a certain space, and the mind acts like a ruler, each person measuring space according to their own emotional means: tranquility, vastness, rigidity, confinement, incongruity, even those lacking a gentle, intimate feeling—all these descriptions of space originate from the feelings of the body and mind.

　　Memories of every city and village begin with the body's experience and measurement of that city and village, and once formed, these impressions are incredibly profound. If this scale changes, this deep emotion is severed, sometimes inevitably leading to a sense of disorientation. When I turned my gaze away from my former self, who frequently tossed tiles into the village stream, I suddenly realized I was already middle-aged. My transparent hands, childlike heart, and waiting youth had long since faded. This is the handiwork of time, turning each brick and tile into a silhouette of the heart from one dawn to another.

　　However, I think the wisdom of composure in life lies in finding a balance between familiarity and unfamiliarity. For example, a friend's disappointment with urban redevelopment stems from his personal roots—an inability to balance the historical and contemporary situation, leading to a tangled and unsettling state of mind. But one shouldn't focus too much on the immediate details. Walking in the beautiful green spaces of the city square, enjoying the moist, cool air, his feelings should lessen.

　　Tiles drifting in the water always bring loss and gain, leaps and falls. Like human emotions and the memories of a city, we don't give up; we still pick up pebbles and tiles, releasing passion in a watery world of the soul. This achieves a higher level of life, like terraced fields, a kind of elevation.

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