【IPSC2018国际赛系列报道】拜访大使馆、做客BBC……

“If you can do something new, let it happen every day. With perseverance, every day becomes a new day.” 

Four thousand years ago, when China got a morpho-syllabic writing system for the first time in history, the first Chinese king who benefited from this new gift said the words above, as a praise for the greatest invention of the time. 

Yet then, there was no such thing called paper. So guess on what did the old king write down his words? He carved it onto his bathtub. 

His reasons were simple: bathing in the tub brought refreshment to the skin, while bathing in thoughts brought refreshment to the soul. Through this kind of refreshment, he wrote down his own story as his prediction of the new future.

One and a half thousand years later, paper finally made its entrance onto the world stage, but it was never late. The king was long dead, but the saying by the old king appeared in books and scrolls, in classics and novels. The combination of the two media of thoughts, paper and writing, enables the grand circulation of ideas, insights and knowledge.

This is the tale of two inventions. Over the time, this story has been told from generation to generation. More people type rather than write, on screens rather than paper. The two inventions are gradually giving ways to new inventions, but behind them, is the greatest invention which never fades: a human mind that always keeps up with the time.

My mother was an English major. Her mom, my grandma, also majored in English. And now, I am following my family’s footsteps, picking up the English language as a major of mine. We are all learning the English language, yet we are not going in the same way.

When grandma entered college, she was in the age of prime, but education wasn’t. Chinese literacy was low: merely over 50 percent; college enrollment was low: only one out of eight; global acceptance was even lower: due to the lack of bilingual talents, even the top universities in China were not well-heard or recognized by the world. It was with the aspiration of changing education for the better that my grandma became a teacher of English, using language to educate people at home and learn more about the peoples across the seas.

When my mom crossed the threshold into higher education, she was experiencing the tides of the Reform and Opening-up. With a 15-percent annual GDP increase, economy was going fast; with 16.75 billion USD invested by global clients, the demand for language talents was staying high. So my mom brought her English talents to the field of international trade, with the hope of giving her international clients a better understanding of China.

Two roads diverged in the woods of English, and I, I am now going to take another one to the unknown. I took out my grandma’s notebook, which was already old and grey and full of sleep, trying to learn something new from the past. On the frontage, wrote nothing but the old king’s saying: “If you can do something new, let it happen every day. With perseverance, every day becomes a new day. ”

This is the unchanged invention in the new era: always be willing to equip ourselves with the new ideas and keep in pace with the time which never waits. Only by bearing this essence of the human virtue in our minds, can we gain the confidence and competence in drawing a clear image of our future, because we know where we are standing. 

This is not only a tale of one of two inventions, or a tale of my family, but also of a gift to mankind, inherited from the past and shared by all: innovation.

The past cannot be changed, but the future is in our power. By innovating our minds with the newest and latest, we invent our own ways of reaching the future and become the best predictors of our time.