The first time I read Shi Tiesheng, I couldn’t understand the line: “Mother and son, we’re in this together—let’s live well, live well…” I was too young then, a kid of thirteen or fourteen who had yet to learn that the bitterness of life can sink into your bones. To me, it was just a mother comforting her son. When I read it again, time had already left its faint marks on me. The sorrow and pain accumulated over more than a decade seeped slowly from between the lines, in the silence that precedes an eruption.

      Only later did I understand: those words weren’t meant for the child. They were a mother kneeling on the cold stone of fate, using her last breath to plead with the world on behalf of her son.

      I often wonder how a person can live through such desolation and misery.

      At twenty-one, Shi Tiesheng suddenly lost the use of his legs. He woke up one morning to find the world transformed, while he was left behind, alone. He sat in his wheelchair, watching others walk, watching the autumn wind swirl fallen leaves into eddies, watching the old walls of Ditan Park slowly crumble in the dusk. At the brightest time of life, he had already said goodbye to his own body.

      Yet he still lived. He still wrote, still thought, still loved, still groped in the depths of pain for something faint but hard. That something was called “the reason to live.” For a long time, this puzzled me: how did such a life—a life so thoroughly wrung out by fate—get through those long, silent, unvisited nights? Later, I thought, perhaps what held him up was precisely the pain itself.

      Pain and regret have weight.

      They don’t come and go as lightly as happiness. They take root. They dig a hole in your heart, and when they dig deep enough, that hole becomes a foundation. When I was young, I didn’t understand this. I thought suffering was a slip of fate, a mistake by heaven, something that shouldn’t have fallen on me. So whenever I was hurt, I felt wronged, felt it was unfair, felt that God owed me an explanation.

      Slowly, I came to realize that life doesn’t owe anyone an explanation, and suffering is inevitable. Everyone comes into this world with their own joys and sorrows already packed deep in their baggage. Some meet the abyss in their youth; others don’t get struck until middle age, or even when their hair has turned white, on some ordinary afternoon, by a trivial matter that suddenly breaks them. Early or late, it makes no difference—when the blade falls, the pain cuts to the bone.

      And regret? Regret is even harder to digest than pain. Pain often comes from the outside, but regret is wine you brew yourself. Once it goes down, it burns your very organs. Everyone has those nights: replaying a wrong word, a wrong turn, a person you didn’t hold onto. Knowing that remorse is useless, you still can’t help looking back, like touching a rotten tooth with your tongue—the more it hurts, the more you can’t stop.

      Regret makes you feel like a sinner. Shi Tiesheng sat in Ditan Park for ten years. He, too, had regrets—regret for the cold words he said to his mother, regret for not taking a good look at her while she was still alive. He didn’t hide that regret. He wrote it out, so finely, so deeply, so painfully, as if he were paying off a debt that can never be settled, on behalf of all the living, to all who have passed.

      And so regret became words. Once it became words, it was no longer just one person’s wound. It became something shared, a secret code by which humans recognize each other.

      You read that line, and you cry. You cry for yourself, for your own nights of regret.

      So I gradually understood that pain and regret are inevitable paths in life, not because they are noble, nor because they are deserved. But because if a person has never truly suffered, they are always light. A light person doesn’t know the weight of a single tear, doesn’t know the taste of staring at the wall in silence late at night, doesn’t know that the words “hold on” sometimes take every ounce of strength a person has.

      Pain presses you down and makes you solid. Regret grinds away your edges. What they wear away is not just your sharpness, but also the shallow arrogance of inexperience. Only after experiencing true loss do you learn to speak softly when you have something; only then do you learn to shut up and listen carefully before saying “I understand you.” No one would willingly trade precious things for these insights, but since the loss has already happened, you have to let it leave something behind.

      Shi Tiesheng later wrote that death is something there’s no need to rush into; death is a festival that will surely come. When I read that line, I suddenly smiled, and then I suddenly wanted to cry. A man in a wheelchair, kept alive by dialysis, could write about death as if it were a festival—had he truly seen through it? I dare not say for sure. But what is certain is that he had lived through pain completely. After living through it completely, a person gains a strange kind of calm—a real calm, warm, quiet. I think that is what lies deepest in suffering. What lies there isn’t an answer or a meaning. Maybe there is nothing else at all, only a quiet fact: you are still here. You have been soaked through by the snowstorms, you have fallen into the mud, you have cried, regretted, thought you couldn’t go on—but you are still here.

      Being here is already an answer.

      Outside the window, the wind has picked up without my noticing.

      I think of that line: “Mother and son, we’re in this together—let’s live well.” This time, there is no confusion. I just quietly hold those words in my mouth, like a piece of candy that won’t melt—sweet, and astringent, and I can’t bear to swallow it.

      The snowstorms of life are long and fierce, and every one of us is just a passerby. But there is always someone who, on the coldest night, kept a lamp lit for you and whispered: Come on, let’s live well.