The original text of Taiwanese writer Lin Qingxuan's essay "Racing Time" is as follows:
When I was in elementary school, my grandmother passed away. My grandmother loved me the most during her lifetime. I couldn't get rid of my sadness. I ran around in circles on the school playground every day. When I was tired, I fell to the ground and threw myself on the lawn crying.
The day of mourning lasted for a long time, and my parents didn’t know how to comfort me. They knew that instead of lying to me and saying that Grandma was asleep, they would be better off telling me the truth: Grandma would never come back.
"What is never coming back?" I asked.
"All things in time will never come back. When your yesterday passes, it will always become yesterday, and you can never go back to yesterday. Dad used to be as young as you, Now you can never go back to your childhood; one day you will grow up and you will be as old as your grandmother, and one day you will spend all your time and you will never come back like your grandmother." Dad said.
My father told me a riddle. This riddle is better than "The calendar is hung on the wall, and a page is torn off every day, which makes me anxious" and "An inch of time is worth an inch of gold, and an inch of gold cannot be bought." "Time flies like an inch" also makes me feel terrible; also the words "time flies like an arrow, the sun and the moon fly like a shuttle" in the text give me an indescribable feeling.
From then on, I would go home from school every day and watch the sun sink into the mountains inch by inch in the courtyard, knowing that the day was really over. Although there will be a new sun tomorrow, there will never be a sun like today. I saw birds flying into the sky, how fast they flew. If they fly the same route tomorrow, it will never be today.
Time flies by so fast that I feel not only anxious but also sad. One day I came home from school and saw that the sun was about to set, so I made up my mind and said, "I will go home faster than the sun." I ran back and stood in the courtyard catching my breath, and saw that half of the sun was still exposed. Face, I jumped with joy. That day I outrun the sun. From now on, I often play games like this. Sometimes I race against the sun, sometimes against the northwest wind, and sometimes I finish a summer vacation homework in ten days. I was in third grade at that time, and I often used my brother’s fifth-grade homework to do. Every time a game beats time, I feel so happy that I don’t know how to describe it.
In the next twenty years, I benefited a lot from this. Although I know that people can never run away from time, people can run a few steps quickly in the time they have. Although those few steps are very small, the effect is huge.
If I have anything to teach my children in the future, I will tell them: If you keep racing against time, you can succeed!