Courage Is a Third Path Beyond Winning and Losing
Translated by AI. Read the Chinese original ↗
Contents 3 sections
Looking back on the road behind me, I feel much.
The greatest victory in life is overcoming oneself.
To overcome yourself requires courage. But where does courage come from?
Often, it is precisely because we have attachments deep in our hearts that people and things seemingly tying us down instead give us immense courage to face life and ourselves.
1 | Overcoming oneself
“To conquer oneself is to be strong.”
— Zhuangzi, Autumn Floods
Defeating others may require only a temporary advantage in talent, circumstances, or resources. Only by facing and moving beyond our own weaknesses, desires, and limits can we forge truly unshakable strength.
I am increasingly certain: our greatest opponent in life is often not someone else, but yesterday’s self.
We do live in a world full of comparison and competition. At school, grades rank us; in society, we compete for positions. Everything seems to remind us that we must outperform others to prove ourselves.
Yet these competitions are only surface illusions of life: temporary, relative, fleeting.
Most people once seen as “opponents” have blurred deep in memory. Who topped the class, who led for a time—even their names and faces often lose clarity.
What truly stays in the heart is not others’ victories and defeats, but our own stance and voice before countless turning points: facing difficulty or retreating, daring to change or remaining trapped in the old self, confronting fear or finding excuses for laziness, procrastination, and self-doubt.
These constitute the real battlefield of my life.
Every upward force and downward tendency arises not outside, but within me. Courage and cowardice, clarity and confusion, perseverance and surrender, all begin with me and end with me.
Rather than racing through fate, people are continually passing through mist they create themselves.
The greatest privilege of a lifetime is becoming truly oneself.
True awakening means drawing our gaze back toward our inner world, vast as the universe, much of it not even named.
Overcoming oneself essentially means meeting our shadows face to face, waking from the illusion of seeking everything externally, and integrating our inner life.
The storms of fate, other people’s eyes, the world’s warmth and cold cannot truly obstruct me. Only the “old me,” accustomed to retreat, self-doubt, and writing a verdict of failure in the night before anything begins, can truly trap me.
I stop escaping, pitying myself, and blaming every disappointment on the outside world. I begin to face my shadows, like someone reading the stars in the wilderness, finally deciding to find a way home.
That moment may not yet blaze with light, but fate has already changed direction in silence.
Without passing through your own night, it is difficult to reach a true dawn.
2 | Courage
“If, upon examining myself, I am upright, I will go forward even against ten thousand people.”
— Mencius, Gongsun Chou I
Reflecting on myself, as long as I confirm that what I do is right and justified, I will advance courageously even before vast armies.
Good fortune confirms us; hardship reveals us to ourselves.
Of all human qualities, if one is most scarce, I think it is courage.
Intelligence is not rare, enthusiasm not difficult to find, even kindness sometimes merely instinctive. Courage alone often means refusing to retreat before fear, refusing to betray before cost, still taking a step into the unknown.
Can someone be brave while afraid? That is the only time they can truly be brave.
It is not heightened emotion, but responsibility taken by the will; not momentary intensity, but refusing to bow to fate despite knowing the difficulty.
Losing courage means not merely lacking a virtue, but closing every door through which life can truly begin.
Many important things require passing through fear. Love risks loss; expression bears misunderstanding; choice carries consequences.
Someone willing to stand only where nothing can go wrong seems to protect themselves, but actually remains trapped. The safest road often contains nothing.
I often envy courageous people: they do not place society’s judgment above their own hearts.
And I must admit that I am often cowardly.
Before many things even begin, I have already imagined their bleak endings. I call this clarity, foresight, more thorough protection than others possess. But strip away this coat of self-defense, and its underlying color is merely cowardice.
True courage often goes beyond calculating gains and losses.
Sometimes we do something not because it is guaranteed to succeed, but because it is right.
Thus courage is a third path beyond winning and losing: it promises no victory, yet gives us strength to stitch a broken world together.
Nobody can always stand high above fate and calmly survey the abyss. Most of the time, amid hesitation, pain, struggle, and unease, we endure our inner shaking while learning to place ourselves again.
Some courage belongs to an instant, such as stepping forward in danger. Some belongs to a lifetime, such as refusing to become numb through long, ordinary years without applause.
The latter is often harder. Instinct can ignite a moment’s passion, but lasting clarity requires willpower to guard it. Remaining honest, kind, and responsible despite ordinary life’s erosion, misunderstanding, loneliness, and futility is itself profound courage.
Courage always means accepting a cost.
Speaking truth may cost the convenience of pleasing others; maintaining principles may cost worldly ease; protecting conscience may cost brief comfort.
We habitually say “Whatever,” “Anything is fine,” “You decide,” yet dare not express our true wishes, afraid that choosing for ourselves means bearing the resulting weight alone.
But not choosing is itself a choice. Avoidance also secretly shapes our fate.
The effort saved through cowardice eventually becomes a hidden ache in later life.
Fear is not shameful, the unknown not terrifying, and mistakes are not the end of the world.
So choose, take responsibility, and face that unknown outcome.
After all, assuming full responsibility for your own life is itself the highest form of courage.
3 | Caring ties
I imagine them sitting at home late at night,
still speaking of the traveler far away.
— Bai Juyi, Thinking of Home on a Winter Solstice Night in Handan
Alone far away during a festival, sitting late into the night, I imagine my family still awake, gathered under a lamp, thinking of me, their traveler away from home.
Many think people lose hope because their responsibilities are too heavy. More often, the opposite is true: carrying too little makes us experience life’s unbearable lightness.
Without deep connections to anyone or anything, without something worth remembering, protecting, or awaiting, life easily becomes empty and weightless.
Apparently free, actually adrift; apparently light, actually void.
A sense of meaning does not arise from abstract speculation, but from concrete relationships.
Give someone your time, a beloved pursuit your energy, a belief your feelings: you may tire, sacrifice, and endure unknown hardship. Yet in the other’s response, in that real and tangible connection, you also gain a deep confirmation:
You do not exist in isolation. Your giving is not without an echo. Somewhere, your life is leaving warmth and traces.
In this sense, human value and meaning are almost entirely built little by little through “relationships” and “feedback.”
Grow a flower that needs tending, keep a dog that wags its tail at you, care for a distant loved one, refuse to let go of an ideal. These seemingly trivial, tender, even burdensome things form our truest connections with the world.
Many spend a lifetime escaping the pressure of “weight,” longing for a lightness without attachments and calling that freedom. But those truly awake instead actively choose and carry their own weight.
Weight does not necessarily mean confinement. Often it is what lets someone stand firmly in the world. Without weight, no roots; without caring ties, no belonging; without people and things we willingly take responsibility for, life scatters in the wind of nothingness.
These ties are precious because they are not forced servitude, but a voluntary turning toward something. You give because that person, pursuit, or feeling has entered your deepest inner order and become part of your life’s meaning.
You carry it not merely because you cannot refuse, but because you willingly choose it.
Nietzsche said that someone who knows why they live can bear almost any how. These specific, small caring ties shield us from life’s most frightening thing—not suffering or exhaustion, but nothingness.
I once heard that if one word could capture the core of Chinese people’s sense of meaning, “caring ties” might be the most fitting.
Now I think it truly is.
The deepest part of Chinese emotional life is often not outward expression, but enduring concern; not loudly declaring “I love you,” but silently remembering whether you are warm, fed, and well, aching for your brokenness.
With someone or something to care about, wherever a person is, they will not be truly lost between heaven and earth.
They may feel lonely, confused, tired through long days, but never utterly alone. They know that somewhere in this vast world, a person, a pursuit, or a waiting quietly connects with them. Their existence is not merely for passing time or maintaining themselves, but for answering, protecting, completing, arriving.
Because of this, facing difficulty and fear, their heart has an extra measure of strength. They know they do not live out of nowhere, or only for themselves.
What truly gives life direction is not escaping everything, but finally finding, in this vast human world, people and things worth willingly staying for, giving to, protecting, and returning to.
With caring ties, we can find the courage to face ourselves, and ultimately achieve the great victory of surpassing ourselves.