The Madness of Summer (夏日瘋狂)

It may be hot. It may not suit everyone. It may be sheer madness.

But if one goes out, one will always find something to delight the eyes.

The things that one finds may be most ordinary.

They may even look familiar

They may be the kinds of things that one can easily find.

almost anywhere in Hong Kong and

some of them may look positively unsightly

or old and tattered



and totally unremarkable

some may even look like sores

 

They don't appear to most people worth any attention at all.

They may be the result of work for someone for some wholly practical purpose



or carelessly planted to add a little color to life.

For whatever purposes those things we find came to be there

one can perhaps find a little solace

from those little things

and marvel at their desire to flourish or simply to "be"

for they all cry out in one voice: summer is come and it's time for the miracle of life. Perhaps it's because they are so ordinary, so familiar, so old and tattered and so easily found that we fail to see them at all. And yet how wonderful it is that they should be there, waiting to be discovered, to be seen and appreciated for what they are and not as we may wish them to be for we seldom realize the stupendous poverty of the human imagination, which never ceases to reduce the ebullient profligacy of the the Universe and of Nature into something which our miniscule brain can comfortably handle, to eliminate that congenital fear of the new and unexpected and that universal human tendency to do its utmost make the world fit with our pre-conceived notions of it, to close our mind, and through such closure, to make us totally blind to that incredible richness of the world, a world which is changing all the time and which for that reason is so full of that truly wonderful quality we call the sense of being "alive"