How failures and difficulties help people develop wisdom

In the traditional culture of China, there is one famous saying that: if God would like to make a person great, he would let him experience a lot of difficulties, both psychological and physical. From this we can see that, no one could be great or wise without exposures to adversity or failure. One must gain the wisdom of living from those hard times. Therefore, living affluent lives will help people develop wisdom.
However, in which way it can help people gain wisdom? How can people living affluent lives develop wisdom? Since wisdom consists of expert knowledge and the regulation of emotion, it can be explained from two perspectives: adversity or failure can help people enhance our knowledge and strengthen our ability to control our emotion, hence, develop our wisdom.
First, experiencing failures and difficulties could help us gain knowledge. Let us see a famous example: to invent long lasting light bulb, Thomas Edison experienced a lot of failures. However, just because of these failures, he learned the knowledge and found the right way which led him to success eventually. In reality, people are often ‘afraid’ of failures. We always imagine that we can be successful directly without any difficulties and failures. Nonetheless, no one can make it. Without experiencing the failures, how could we know what is right, what is wrong? Actually, failure itself is a kind of knowledge, and how to treat it is a kind of wisdom. We all know that, failure is the mother of success. Thanks to those difficulties, we could find our shortage, find the mistakes, therefore, find the solutions; thanks to those failures, we know that we need to learn more and in which part we should improve ourselves, so that we could understand truth better, see those complex theories clearer and moreover, understand ourselves better. It guides us a way of studying, at the same time, inspire us to gain more knowledge. Hence, adversities or failures are not ‘horrible dreams’ we would like to forget, but the way life teaches us, the way we can enhance our knowledge, develop our wisdom, which we should remember.
Second, failures and difficulties will not only help us enhance our knowledge, but also help us control our emotions better.
As Karen Parker and her colleagues at Stanford showed from their studies that, exposure to adversity can “enhance the development of brain systems that regulate emotional, neuroendocrine and cognitive control.” (Hall, 2007). This is a scientific way to explain how failures or hard experience can help us. In addition, we can also find evidence from our lives to prove this. We would like to say children are like the flowers in the ‘Green house’. This is because they do not experience a lot, do not learn from failures and do not know how to control themselves. Therefore, they are weak, and you can never say a child is wise. When we are experiencing a hard time in our lives, we may feel bad, helpless and depress. We have no confidence about our future. However, if we can overcome such a period of time, we would develop ourselves. Because we experience more, we will understand more. People can only cope with those negative feelings after they experienced them. Just like Vivian Clayton’s father, only after experienced so many difficulties, he could sit next to his frail mother and celebrate their survival, even though there were still bombs down, with a cup of tea—the ‘tea’ only belongs to wise people (Hall, 2007).
Just like if you want to get gold, you have to heat it; if you want to find the truth, you have to face failure; if you want to treat life calmly, you have to experience adversity. Because this is the way we can fain ourselves, this is the way we can develop wisdom in our lives.

Reference:Hall, S.S. (2007, May 8). Wisdom comes with age? Not true. The Straits Times

How to solve waste disposal in CHina

In today’s world, the waste disposal problem has become one of the biggest challenges that the whole society has to face. Therefore, from a future engineer’s perspective, one way that my country, China, can solve the problem is by applying the zero-waste plan.
Since my country, China, has the largest population in the world and is developing very fast nowadays, there is a big consumption of resources and goods which leads to a very serious waste disposal problem. Because of the fact in China, the traditional ways to solve this problem are not very efficient. For instance, land-filing is one of the most common ways to deal with waste problem. However, because of China’s large population and limited useful land, it is very hard for the government to plan more land for land-filling. Otherwise, there will be not enough land for farming and living, which may cause more problems. Similarly, the other common way, incineration will also bring a big environment problem since the consumption leads to big waste and a lot of these wastes are bad for the environment if we just simply incinerate them like plastic. Hence, for modern China, the best way to solve this problem is to recycle, to work from the first step, by designing anything that cannot be recycled or reused out of the system (Collins, J 2002) which is exactly the way that zero-waste worked. This plan really has a positive effect on this issue. For instance, in Britain, as soon as it applied zero-waste, “they find they are recycling more than 50%” (Collins, J 2002). However, to achieve this aim, we need the whole society’s support. Although industry is the key player, we still need the government’s support and most importantly, everyone’s support. Only in this way, we can really solve this problem, give ourselves, give the whole country and give the world a better future.

Reference: Collins, J (2002, Oct, 3rd.) Radical Plans for waste would herald a big clean-up. The guardian weekly P.25

the last drop of water in the world

There was once a public advertisement that made a deep impression on me; in the picture there were no trees, no grass, no water—nothing but sand. Then, there was one eye appearing, with a drop of tear and one sentence: Do not make the last drop of water in the world be your tear. I saw this advertisement when I was just a child, it moved me a lot. In addition, it made me start to realize one of the most serious environmental problems in my home country China, is the pollution of water. Nonetheless, it not means that we can do nothing. Actually, we do have some solutions from different aspects, and the most important two are from government and engineering.
Because of pollution from industry and people’s everyday life, the water that can be used for farming and drinking becomes less and less. It is a serious problem for the great increasing population and the development of the whole country. Based on research on the water quality of 700 rivers, approximate 100,000 kilometers, which was done by the Ministry of Water Resources of China in 2002, more than 46.5% of the water had been polluted for a long time; about 10.6% water was too polluted for drinking or irrigation; more than 90% of the water within urban areas were polluted. All these problems lead to the fact that about one quarter of the Chinese population haves to use the water that does not reach the hygiene standards, which means more than 30 million people’s health and lives are affected by the pollution of water. For instance, due to an accident in a chemical factory on the Songhua River in Ji Lin province, the provincial capital city was without water for 4 days.( “Chinese serious water pollution”, 2002)
The effort from the Chinese government is the most essential to protect water from being polluted. There are many ways a government can support the process of preventing water pollution. First is the support of investment. It is very important, because money is the foundation of everything nowadays. For example, to solve a certain pollution of water, it requires experts joined and machines, tools, which all need money. Second is the support from policies and laws’ aspect. Since in today’s world, everyone respects the law, government should make some policies and laws that can guide the associate departments as a reference to do their work, which can make things easier, more efficient. For instance, there are some commissioners of congress pointed out that, the government should make some policies to connect the action of solve water pollution with the officers’ evaluations, in order to encourage them put more effort in it. (“How to solve the problem of water pollution” 2007)Third is educating people about how to protect water, how to protect environment which all these information government can offer to public. Therefore, people can realize the problem, care about it and start to think how to solve it. For example, people may not know the side effect of using washing-powder with phosphorus inside, which can actually eutrophicate water if government never takes some actions to let people know such knowledge. Only when more and more people join the action, we could have the chance to solve it.
In addition to governmental support, engineers can help in two ways. First is to reduce the pollution from those polluted water emitted from factories or other resources. Therefore, we can use some machines by applying both physical and chemical methods to clear away those deleterious elements, like filtrating, chemical reacting. For instance, the technology of membrane can solve some water polluted problems by separating pure water and those polluting stuffs efficiently. In addition, it can be applied by both big factory and individual family, which make it becoming a widely used technology to solve pollution of water. The other way to solve this problem from an engineering perspective could be reusing other water by applying some cleaning technology. For instance, in Singapore, people use some methods to produce “new water” from that waste water. This is an effect way to reduce the pollution of water either.
However, despite the government or engineering solutions, the only way to really solve this problem is from ourselves. Everyone s to understand the situation, understanding we should take actions to protect water and ourselves. Please remember, do not make the last drop of water in the world be your tear.

References
Chinese serious water pollution (2002). In Hua Xia Shui online. Retrieved 14/3/08, from http://www.hwcc.com.cn/nsbd/NewsDisplay.asp?Id=39417
How to solve the problem of water pollution (2007). In Xin Hua online. Retrieved 14/3/08, from http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2007-12/26/content_7314381.htm

"green" person

There is a kind of people that deeply concerned with the environment called “green” person. They have a quite different attitude toward consumption comparing with normal people. For the normal people, before they buy something, the main consideration should be the price, the brand or the quantity, however, for the “green” people, they just consider about whether it is eco-friendly. For instance, to buy a car, many people will compare different cars’ oil consumption due to the economical consideration while those “green” people thinking about this point only because more oil consumption means more pollution to the environment. For the normal people, in their daily life, they make effort to improve their lives’ quantity, however, for the “green” people, they make effort to reduce wasting, save resources for environment. For instance, normal people may use water to irrigate the plants which they like, and definitely wouldn’t use it again because they think these water are not cleaned anymore while the “green” people will try to avoid using more water like not have their own plant in their home or reuse them in order to reduce the consumption, because they know that there is not enough water for many places, they want to save them even though it will effect on their life’s quantity. Therefore, for normal people, we will consider more reality problems while the “green” people will put environment problem in the first place toward the problem like consumption. Not everyone can do as those “green” people, maybe it is also not necessary. However, we need to do something, from those little things around us—because the world is not someone’s home—it is everyone’s home.

my life's meaning

People like to treat life as a long journey. We walk on our different ways, leading to the destination in our own mind. Some people think we walk on this long way with a mission to search for something, which is the meaning of our life. It may leave in some places where you can see, like billions of money, high social status, some great achievements. However, for me, the meaning of life is just the way I living.

There is a saying that, happiness is just the process that you searching for it. In my opinion, life is also like this: the most significant thing in life is not which you achieve at the end, but every moment you get from it; the meaning of life is not something we can measure simply, but during the process, every time we feeling, we moved by, we understanding, we learning from and we appreciating those beautiful things around us.

I appreciated every afternoon that I can enjoy the beautiful sunshine with my favorite book in hand; I learned from every fantastic people who appeared in my life; I understood the importance to help others; I was moved by the love reflected simply hand in hand; I tried to feel every shining moment, even it is just a tiny point, but if we link them all, that will be the track of our life—that will be the meaning of our life.

Therefore, the meaning of my life is not an easy word for me—it means a lot, a lot.
Nevertheless, I am not hurry to dig it out, because I am still on my way, and the meaning of my life is still noted as: to be continued…