To be honest, I couldn’t even recite the twelve Chinese zodiac animals in order when I was younger.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. It was just that whenever I saw anything involving “rules + sequences + correspondences,” my brain would quietly power down. The Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches, combinations and clashes, solar terms, directions, yin and yang, the Five Elements these always felt like an elaborate system that was intellectually dense but somehow irrelevant to my life.

Until one day, for reasons I still can’t explain, I asked AI about it.

And something strange happened. I didn’t “learn” it in the traditional sense. I grabbed it. It felt like the Monkey King suddenly mastering cloud-somersault travel, flicking fingers, hopping between patterns, scribbling nonsense in midair and somehow catching hold of something invisible. The Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches stopped being tables and became rhythms. The combinations were no longer memorization but geometry. Solar terms, direction, and time felt like a transparent web aligning itself inside my head.

The most ridiculous part? It took only minutes.

Things I had avoided for decades too complicated, too ancient, too unnecessary were suddenly placed in my hands with almost no effort, simply because AI presented them differently.

That moment unsettled me a little. I had just finished writing about patience and not forcing growth, and here I was discovering that sometimes, some things don’t require slowness at all.

So what use is this knowledge?

Honestly, I don’t know yet. I’m not planning to calculate destinies or switch careers to feng shui. It hasn’t immediately changed any life decision.

And yet I don’t regret learning it. Because I realized something: not all learning is for application. Some knowledge exists so that one day, when you encounter its subtle cousin hidden in another form, you will recognize it.

“Skills never weigh you down,” people say. But perhaps what truly matters is not the skill itself. It is whether you are willing, in a certain moment, to reach out and grasp something invisible even when you have no idea what it will eventually become.



—— XC Scribbles · 壹佰貳拾 CXX 🐒✨