Editor’s note: On March 16, 2025, at ALSOLIVE in Foshan, Guangdong, Professor Cheng Qing held a launch for his new book Relief for Life and spoke with Professor Yuan Changgeng about finding one’s own rhythm amid anxiety. This bonus episode comes from the live recording, first published bythe podcast Bankrupt Bookstore, Episode 73。

. “Does anyone else find ages twenty-five to thirty difficult?” We fear what comes later will be harder. Unable to escape emotion and pressure, people are pushed along passively for years. We all want a fitting rhythm and a point of leverage more certain than hope, something that can power a change in life.

At the Relief for Life launch at One Way Space’s Shunde ALSO shop, historian Cheng Qing and anthropologist Yuan Changgeng explore the field of life: courage to let the self overflow the mainstream, decisiveness in life, the wisdom at the core of Buddhist faith, patience in building connections with the world, and taking active responsibility amid a modernity of discarded responsibility.

This practical, exceptionally sincere conversation stays close to our shared predicament and repeatedly reveals freedom and possibilities already present.

“After watching live houses for decades, this was my first time walking onstage from backstage. I enjoyed being a musician for once.” The opening reflection becomes a metaphor. Through the realm of Chan, the truth of every doctrine lies beneath its signs. There is no absolute method or instant shortcut to awakening. You must genuinely live and bear the grammatical weight of being the subject who finds life’s rhythm.

06:30 A happy life depends more on cultivating sound judgment and decisiveness about one’s own life

14:31 The degree of competition affects sensitivity to life

23:35 Home and workplace can, in principle, both become sites of practice

31:15 Do not seek a supposed tool for mastering life

34:03 One aspect of modern society especially hard to overcome is everyone’s wish to be safe

43:59 Human civilization reached today because we attend to the limits of individual circumstances

49:14 A reasonable view of life requires resisting many external judgments

54:40 Excessive attachment to reliability and stability inevitably makes worldly change painful

01:02:23 How can we keep social media from controlling our emotions?

01:14:48 We live too tensely; we are not as easily destroyed as we imagine