Sima Qian
If today were one line in the record of my life, what would it say?
📝ONGO's Reflection
Sima Qian was castrated for defending a friend. Enduring the deepest humiliation a person can bear, what he did was write a history that outlived his own age. The 130 chapters of the Records of the Grand Historian are not one man's revenge but proof of what a human being can do in the face of disgrace. We often stop in our tracks when we suffer an injustice. But Sima Qian shows us that the one with the deepest wound writes the words that last the longest. Sentences as deep as the time one has endured.
"A man can die but once; some deaths are weightier than Mount Tai, others lighter than a feather."Sima Qian, 報任少卿書 (Letter to Ren An)
🌱Apply It Today
At the end of today, write just one line — in a diary, a memo, anywhere. It need not be grand. "Today was a ___ kind of day" — that blank space becomes your own Records a year from now.
