I've been trying to write a post for the past two hours, but it has all come to naught. In lieu of my own words, here are some from other people that I've been mulling over lately.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

--Socrates, from Plato's Apology

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air. They do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Which of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?

--the Son, from Matthew

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

--T.S. Eliot, from "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock"

I wish I had a river I could skate away on.

--Joni Mitchell, "River"

I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

--Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet

But when he, the Spirit of Truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own. He will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come.

--the Son, from John

I'm leaving Nanchang in two days, and China in six. All peace to you.