Don't reflect too much

I was talking to a friend the other day, and he said something that resonated with me: It's not good to reflect too much. Sometimes reflection can only leave one more depressed. One should be pragmatic and simply live!

I think that this is very true. For the past week (before the 张家界 trip), I felt dry and somewhat depressed. Looking back, I realize this is because I was reflecting too much, over-analyzing my life and my emotions, and paradoxically, it sucked the life out of me. I think that as humans, our thoughts and emotions are so hopelessly intertwined that thinking about bad emotions can trigger them, which would distort our thinking, decapacitate our normal functional logic, and suck us into a deep, dark hole. Therefore, I should be cautious navigating through the perilous emotional sea, staying away from the whirlpools which I know I'm not strong enough to escape.

Life is too big to fit in my frameworks. However, analyzing life requires me to describe it in terms I can understand, and this inevitably leads me to constrain life to fit narrow logic. After a while, such reflection leads to a pessimistic, dry, machine-like attitude; although I might profess to have gather many lessons from life, I am in fact dead. Truly, I have seen little and understand little; my mental framework for life is terribly insufficient and probably the best I can do is to live like child: living in the present, wide-eyed to and expectant of new experiences, not trying to understand everything. Spontaneity is what gives life its breath.