Every April, people of the Dai ethnic group in Yunnan Province celebrate their biggest festival of the year—the Water Splashing Festival (泼水节). This marks the official New Year celebration for the Dai people     1     live in China, mainly in Xishuangbanna and Dehong of Yunnan. It     2     (general) starts in mid-April and lasts for three days.

On the first two days of the festival, people clean their houses, have their hair cut, and take baths.     3     (vary) activities are also staged. Many send     4     (burn) lanterns into the air, dance and sing in the streets,     5     watch colorful dragon boat races on the Lancang River. The third day of the festival marks the first day of the New Year on the Dai calendar. In the morning, people often visit a temple     6     (hold) a ceremony. After that, the mass water splashing     7     (begin). People use anything at hand to splash water on each other, from friends and neighbors to     8     (stranger) in the streets, as     9     expression of their wishes for good luck and prosperity for whoever is on the receiving end.

The Water Splashing Festival of the Dai people     10     (include) in China’s National List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2006.

9 . Setting goals is common in our life. We look ahead, predict what may make us happy in the future, and then narrow down the things to something specific. For the most part, having goals is better than not having any, but there are also problems that come with spending an entire life living from goal to goal.

For one thing, we attempt to predict an unpredictable future. Who is to say that what you want next year is the same thing you want right now? What if what you want right now isn’t in the right direction over the long term?

Secondly, and just as importantly, you only confine your expectations of happiness and satisfaction to the goal you have set so that you often forget that other things in your life can also add just as much joy to your experience. This creates a strange conflict.

To solve this conflict, we have to move towards something more vague (模糊的). Going after interestingness, I think is what we should do. It’s vague enough to be honest about the unpredictability of the future.

Interestingness isn’t hedonism (快乐主义). It’s deeper than that. It’s taking on that random project you had no plan to take on because you have a feeling that you might just learn something you didn’t know about yourself. It’s seeing a person you just met not as a potential partner or someone who can do something for you but simply as someone who may open a new, unknown and unique world for you. Goals incorrectly assume that we already know what we want. Interestingness is more modest. It makes up its mind as it moves, slowly blowing from one thing to another, until it eventually grasps something that lies beyond prediction.