Before My Birthday, the Wine Is Already Chilling

Today I delivered the wine for my birthday to the restaurant.

The bottles were wrapped layer by layer and lay quietly inside their cardboard box. My birthday has not even arrived, yet they are already there, chilling in advance. It feels as though the birthday I have kept calling a “big celebration” has finally become a little more real.

The wine is ready. Now it is just a matter of waiting for everyone to arrive.

Wrapped bottles of wine in a cardboard box, ready to be chilled at the restaurant for my birthday — My birthday has not arrived, but the wine got there before us.

I went to the gym in the morning. It was quiet inside, with sunlight falling through the windows onto rows of equipment. After training, I played Valorant for a while. My body had only just left the machines when my hands returned to the keyboard and mouse—a fairly quick change of mode.

Morning sunlight entering a quiet gym lined with training equipment — The gym in the morning. First, get the body moving.

A Valorant match displayed on a monitor — A little Valorant after training. Neither exercise nor gaming was left out today.

I like this kind of rhythm at the moment: move when I want to move and play properly when I want to play. Every minute does not need to be packaged as “meaningful.” It is enough for the day to feel concrete.

There was another meeting in the afternoon. The red screen at the front of the hall was impossible to miss as the undergraduate mathematics meeting went on. When it ended, I did not go straight back. I went to the library instead.

The hall for an undergraduate mathematics meeting in the School of Science — The afternoon meeting. The day still had somewhere else to go afterwards.

I stayed until nine at night.

By the time I left the library, it was completely dark. A single streetlamp was glowing beside the path, and the gym, the game, and the meeting from earlier in the day suddenly seemed far away.

A streetlamp glowing beside a campus path after nine at night — Leaving the library at nine, with the streetlamp still on.

Looking back, nothing dramatic happened today. I trained for a while, played for a while, attended a meeting, and sat in the library until nine.

Perhaps university life is supposed to look something like this. It does not need to produce a beautiful result every day. Much of the time, it is simply a matter of placing the things I enjoy, the things I should do, and the people I want to see into my days, little by little.

I will end with a passage I saw today that is often circulated online under the name of “Professor Sun of the University of Hong Kong.” I have not verified its original source, but it fits this day particularly well:

“At university, you should get up early and have some breakfast; go for a run; listen carefully in your major courses; read a magazine you enjoy during the general courses; take a short nap at noon; join a club activity or play some basketball in the afternoon; walk with someone you like in the evening, or sit quietly in a study room and read… Society does not need straight-A students, nor does it recognise student-union presidents, and it certainly does not hope to see students abandon their studies to start businesses. You only need to complete university steadily and fully, find the people and interests you love, read some books without a particular purpose that can enrich your thinking, meet a few wonderfully good friends, exercise and shape your body, and learn well the professional knowledge needed for the work you want to pursue… Do these things, and passing through these university years quietly is already more than enough.”