Improving Cognitive Ability Is the Path to Clarity and Inner Freedom
True open-mindedness is not the inability to see wind and rain, but the ability to remain clear, discerning, and composed within them. Improving cognitive ability helps us avoid being pulled around by emotion, trapped by circumstances, or blinded by temporary gains and losses. [中文]
Every time I read Su Shi’s Ding Feng Bo, I feel its force and breadth:
Do not listen to the rain beating through the trees.
Why not chant and whistle, and walk on slowly?
A bamboo staff and straw sandals feel lighter than a horse.
Who is afraid? In a straw raincoat, I let mist and rain be my life.
The chilly spring wind sobers me from wine; it is slightly cold.
Yet the slanting sunlight on the hilltop comes to greet me.
Looking back at the desolate road I have just traveled, I return.
There was no wind and rain, and there was no clear sky.
This short lyric seems to open an expansive realm of life. Wind and rain, a bamboo staff, straw sandals, slanting sunlight, and the road home are all ordinary scenes. Yet in Su Shi’s writing, they become a spiritual landscape. A thousand years later, we can still feel a power that crosses time.
I think this power is not only the beauty of literary expression. It is also the beauty of a higher cognitive perspective.
1. Open-mindedness is not the absence of storms, but the refusal to be defined by them
“Do not listen to the rain beating through the trees” does not mean the rain was unheard. The storm was clearly there. The leaves were being struck, and the road was not easy.
Yet Su Shi says, “Do not listen.”
This does not mean escaping reality. It means not allowing external storms to dominate the rhythm of one’s inner life. In difficult circumstances, people are easily pulled along by their environment. When the outside world becomes chaotic, the inner world becomes chaotic too. When others judge us, we waver. When something goes wrong, life itself seems to turn dark.
When cognitive ability is limited, people often mistake the partial for the whole, the temporary for the permanent, and emotion for truth.
After one failure, they conclude that they are incapable. After one difficult relationship, they deny all their efforts. After one setback, they feel that fate has treated them unfairly.
As cognitive ability improves, a person gradually understands that wind and rain are only wind and rain, not the whole of life; difficulties are only difficulties, not the final verdict; emotions are only emotions, not facts themselves.
True open-mindedness first comes from this ability to distinguish.
2. Clarity means seeing both the situation and oneself
“Why not chant and whistle, and walk on slowly?” is moving because Su Shi is not speaking from outside the storm. He is inside the wind and rain, yet he is still able to walk slowly.
This is a high spiritual capacity.
Very often, people are not defeated by events themselves, but by their interpretation of those events. Under pressure, we keep magnifying the consequences. When misunderstood, we keep imagining what others think of us. When facing uncertainty, we keep manufacturing fear.
Before the situation has truly worsened, the mind has already become disordered.
A clear person is not someone without emotions, but someone who knows that emotions cannot directly replace judgment. A clear person is not someone without pain, but someone who knows that pain cannot directly decide direction.
The improvement of cognitive ability moves a person from being directly pulled by stimuli toward understanding, judging, and regulating those stimuli.
To see the wind and rain is a sense of reality. To avoid being dragged away by them is cognitive strength. To still chant, whistle, and walk slowly is spiritual maturity.
3. “Lighter than a horse” is spiritual freedom
“A bamboo staff and straw sandals feel lighter than a horse” appears to say that walking with a staff and sandals is more agile than riding a horse. At a deeper level, it describes spiritual freedom.
Why do people feel heavy?
Often, it is not because they truly carry so much, but because the mind is occupied by too many fixations: I must win, I must be recognized, I must get results immediately, I must prove that I was not wrong.
The more of these fixations one carries, the more exhausted one becomes.
Su Shi’s lightness does not come from superior material conditions. It comes from the lightness that follows inner release. A bamboo staff and straw sandals are simple things, but because the mind is at ease, they become lighter than a horse.
This is precisely the change brought by cognitive growth.
When a person lacks cognitive maturity, external conditions can easily become too important. Position, reputation, evaluation, victory, defeat, gain, and loss may all become the only sources of self-worth. Once the external world changes, the inner world shakes with it.
As cognitive ability improves, a person gradually builds a more stable system of self-evaluation. One learns what is truly important and what is temporary; what deserves investment and which emotions need not be entangled with; that life is not an instant ranking, but a long road.
Lightness does not mean refusing to work hard. It means refusing to be crushed by meaningless burdens.
4. Letting life unfold is active acceptance after experience
“In a straw raincoat, I let mist and rain be my life” almost condenses Su Shi’s whole bearing toward life.
The word “let” here is not passive resignation. It is acceptance after experience. It is not giving up action, but continuing forward amid uncertainty.
Many people misunderstand open-mindedness as “forget it,” “it does not matter,” or “I will no longer strive.” That may not be open-mindedness. It may simply be fatigue, avoidance, or numbness.
True open-mindedness means still choosing to love life after seeing it clearly. It means still being willing to work seriously after understanding that the world is imperfect. It means knowing that life contains wind and rain, yet not giving up one’s own rhythm and direction.
The lower one’s cognitive ability, the more easily one swings between two extremes: excessive excitement when things go well and total negation when setbacks arrive. The higher one’s cognitive ability, the more one can remain stable amid change: not losing oneself in good times and not collapsing in hard times.
To “let mist and rain be my life” is not to hand oneself over to fate. It is to free the mind from narrow calculations of gain and loss.
5. “No wind and rain, no clear sky” is a higher transparency
The most wonderful part of the lyric is, of course, its ending:
“Looking back at the desolate road I have just traveled, I return. There was no wind and rain, and there was no clear sky.”
When young, one may read this as ease and detachment. After experiencing more of life, one realizes that it is a kind of transparency.
When people are inside the storm, the storm seems immense. When standing under clear skies, they easily cling to the brightness. But when a person has truly walked a stretch of road and looks back, both storm and sunlight become parts of life.
This does not deny pain, nor does it deny happiness. It means no longer being fully occupied by any single state.
When cognitive ability truly improves, a person gradually moves from “the center of the event” to “the whole of life.” One no longer defines oneself through a single incident, no longer defines life through one success or failure, and no longer judges the future through one low point.
When wind and rain arrive, one knows they will pass. When clear skies arrive, one also knows they will not last forever.
Because of this, a person can become truly free.
6. Improving cognitive ability is a way to better settle oneself
We often talk about improving cognitive ability, and we usually understand it as gaining knowledge, expanding information, or mastering methods. These are certainly important. But more fundamentally, cognitive ability determines how a person understands the self, others, and the world, and how one settles the mind in complex situations.
People with strong cognitive ability may not have everything go smoothly, but they are less easily trapped by partial situations. They may not be free of pain, but they can understand pain more deeply. They may not always be optimistic, but they can maintain direction amid uncertainty.
Clarity is not coldness. Open-mindedness is not indifference.
Clarity means not being covered by illusion. Open-mindedness means not being imprisoned by wind and rain.
Perhaps a person’s true maturity is the gradual movement from “Why am I the one facing this storm?” to “Storms are also part of life, and I can still walk slowly.”
Conclusion
Su Shi is great not only because he wrote beautiful lyrics, but because he transformed life’s difficulty, setbacks, exile, and disappointment into an expansive spiritual bearing.
It is not that he never experienced wind and rain. It is that he turned wind and rain into scenery. It is not that he had no pain. It is that he turned pain into transparency. It is not that he did not know how hard the world can be. It is that amid hardship, he still kept clarity, humor, brightness, and composure.
So when we read Ding Feng Bo, we are not only reading Su Shi. We are also reading a possible realm of life that we ourselves may reach.
Improving cognitive ability is what makes true clarity possible.
And only after becoming sufficiently clear can a person become truly open-minded.