A few years ago, I felt that my life had come to a standstill. I was living the same day over and over again.
During my four years as an undergraduate, I forced myself not to stay in my dormitory playing League of Legends. I spent most of my time in classrooms and libraries, as well as in the liberal arts building’s self-study room, the only one that stayed open until midnight. Besides completing assignments for chemistry classes I did not enjoy, I also had to teach myself other subjects.
Perhaps for the same reason, I played all the video games I had not played during those four years of university during that period instead.
It was a parkour racing game. Players controlled a character who could move in all directions, jump, dash, and use items scattered across each map to reach the finish line.
After the gaokao, I had already grown tired of competition—or perhaps I simply did not like meaningless competition. I especially disliked competing in ways that did not expand the breadth of my knowledge, but only made me more practiced at avoiding mistakes on a particular question.
For this game, however, a race naturally meant rankings. I was back in competition, and there was only one map. If I wanted to place near the top, I still had to repeat the map again and again, summarize what I had learned, and eventually win the championship.
One of the maps was called “Escape from Hell.” On the Hong Kong server, its name was “Never Look Back.”
The map was set against a scarlet background. Players could see less than a few meters of the path ahead, and the path was only about three people wide. If you fell, you had to return to the starting point and begin again.
The standard for the gold cup—an indicator of mastery awarded for completing the map within the time limit—was to finish the entire course in 48 seconds.
But on my first attempt, I took three hours.
I tried walking slowly and discovered that gaps began to appear in the second half, requiring a combination of jumps and dashes. Later, I began running at a normal speed, only to find that ghostly skeletons appeared in the final section. If I collided with one, I would be knocked away, fall into the void, return to the beginning, and start all over again.
And so I repeated it, again and again and again. I have forgotten how many times I did it.
But little by little, I began to understand the general route of the track. I learned where the holes were and which fixed pattern I should follow in each section.
Eventually, I was able to run at full speed, just like in the videos other people had posted, and win the gold cup as if there were no obstacles at all.
The trick was to keep repeating, keep experimenting, and not be afraid of starting over. Through repetition, I gradually came to understand the whole picture. In total, I had spent only five or six hours on that map.
My life in the past seems to have been similar: walking on thin ice while accelerating forward. The biggest breakthroughs and changes often seemed to happen when I was training alone.
“Escape from Hell” and “Never Look Back” are different translations used by the mainland and Hong Kong servers. I prefer the latter. The former suggests escaping from an environment I dislike; the latter, to me, expresses a determination to move forward without turning back.
In A Record of the Stone Bell Mountain, Wang Anshi wrote of a situation “where darkness, confusion, and obscurity leave nothing by which one can understand it.” Circumstances like that often appear in my life, when no one can give me a clear answer.
At times like that, I always tell myself: “Move forward bravely. Never look back.”
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both,
Being one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
The Road Not Taken — Robert Frost