知不可乎驟得，托遺響於悲風
What cannot be hurried, we leave to the wind.
More than ten years ago, in middle school, I studied Chinese literature. I remember reading Su Shi’s Ode to the Red Cliffs. (《赤壁赋》by 苏轼 (AD 1037 - 1101) Soong Dynasty’s poet, scholar-official, and later, political exile.)
...（曹操） 方其破荊州，下江陵，順流而東也， 艫千裏，旌旗蔽空，釃酒臨江，橫槊賦詩，固一世之雄也，而今安在哉？
At that time Cao (Han Dynasty warlord, circa AD 208) took Jingzhou, seized Jiangling, and then sailed eastward down the Yangtze River in warships chained together for over a thousand miles, with flags flaunting in defiance of the vast open skies. Cao drank with pleasure before the river and composed his poems with his spear resting on his lap. Cao was indeed a hero for his generation but yet, where is he now?
English translation source: HKU (link)
Su’s poetry was wistful, melancholic yet vivid. You could hear the imagery of the sweep of the Yangtze, the roar of history, the fragile smallness of a single lifetime set against the endless current of history.
There was a line, however, which I could not understand. It felt ornamental, it felt elusive, it felt resigned.
知不可乎驟得，托遺響於悲風。
I know this (accomplishments in life) is not something easily obtainable and therefore I can only leave the melancholy (flute) music to the desolate (autumn) wind.English translation source: HKU (link)
It left me with the dissatisfaction of an unread sentence as I couldn’t understand the sentiments of it back then. Little did I know years later it would give me instructions on how to live a life.
At age fifteen, I juggled nine subjects in middle school. English to Chinese literature, physics to geography, maths to biology. There were subjects I loved and subjects that I absolutely dreaded, but everything demanded the same pace, the same urgency, the same weight at examinations. I thought that once I reached college where I could finally follow my passion, life would get better.
In college, I picked up a part-time job so I could afford more for myself. I told myself life would be better once I graduated and found “a real job.”
Then I graduated, got that job, and immediately found myself hoping for a better-paying one. After that? I thought life would get better with the next promotion, the one that didn’t materialise; or the startup that ran out of venture funding and failed, or the romantic relationships I sought that wasn’t meant to be. I remember that one day when my debit card bounced while paying for lunch with my interns and realising I didn’t even have money to pay for it, because I sunk way too much of my own savings funding my startup. Life, or kismet if you will.. wore me down. I was that one or two, or sometimes three, four milestones away from the life I thought I should have already arrived at. Perpectually a whisker away from happiness.
And somewhere in the middle of all that running, came that line again: 知不可乎驟得 — in my youth, I wanted everything in life; love, fortune, acclaim and accomplishment, but these are not things won quickly, nor arrive at frequently. And looking back on the years gone by, what found me was chance, what I lost was probably never mine to keep. In the quest for them, to seek and not obtain, to reach yet not to arrive — this is the way of life so often is. And perhaps what I mistook for failure was simply just the world’s slow unfolding, moving at a pace I disliked. So much of living, I’ve come to realise, is spent in the quiet distance between wanting and receiving.
And the next line, 托遺響於悲風 to leave the lamenting of the whatifs to the sorrowful winds as an afterthought. It took me more than ten years to understand that in the face of life’s hardship and uncertainty as the only constant, it wasn’t about resignation nor pessimism, just like Su’s political banishment and exile. It was about a loosening of grip around the things I once thought I had to secure or I would lose forever, to find peace in realising that some things cannot be rushed. They do not arrive on demand nor are they conquered by effort alone. Some roads are long and they come in their own time, and no amount of hard work, sprinting or prayers will make them come any sooner. The wind takes what we cannot hold, and time returns what we are meant to receive.
And maybe the deeper message in Su’s line 知不可乎驟得，托遺響於悲風 was about clarity: Self-possession, quiet peace, the kind of steady happiness that doesn’t burn out in your hands. It was about letting go but yet not giving up, entrusting certain goals to time, to echo a little longer in the wind, unfinished, but carried gently rather than forced. An act not of defeat, but of patience. Of wisdom.