If Life Were Only as at First Meeting: What Nalan Xingde's Sleepless Poetry Teaches Us About Emotional Rest

He had everything. And he could not sleep.

Nalan Xingde — born in 1655 into one of the most powerful Manchu families in the Qing Dynasty, educated at the finest institutions of his era, appointed as a first-rank imperial bodyguard to the Kangxi Emperor, surrounded by silk and jade and the most refined culture of his time — spent much of his short life lying awake in the dark, writing poems about what he had lost.

人生若只如初见，何事秋风悲画扇。

If life were only as at first meeting — why would the autumn wind grieve over a painted fan?

This line — perhaps the most quoted line in Chinese poetry after the Tang masters — is not about autumn or fans. It is about the gap between the freshness of beginning and the weight of what comes after. It is about the particular exhaustion of a heart that has loved and lost and cannot stop returning to the moment before the loss began.

Nalan Xingde's wife, Lu, died in 1677 after only three years of marriage. He was twenty-two. He never fully recovered. His poetry from that point forward is saturated with her absence — with the cold side of the bed, the empty chair, the dreams that bring her back only to take her again at waking. He died at thirty, having written some of the most emotionally precise verse in the Chinese literary tradition.

His insomnia was not a medical condition. It was a form of loyalty — the heart's refusal to rest in a world that no longer contained what it most loved. And in that refusal, he left us a map of the relationship between unprocessed emotion and the sleep that will not come.

The heart that cannot let go cannot rest. And the heart that has been given permission to grieve — fully, honestly, without rushing toward resolution — finds, in time, its way back to sleep.

Movement: The Imperial Guard Who Walked the Palace Walls

Nalan Xingde's official role required him to accompany the Emperor on imperial tours — long journeys on horseback through the northern landscapes of Manchuria and Mongolia, across grasslands and through mountain passes, in conditions that were often harsh and always physically demanding. His poetry from these journeys is among his most vivid: the cold of the northern steppe, the sound of wind through the grass, the particular loneliness of being far from home in a landscape of vast, indifferent beauty.

This physical life — demanding, outdoor, seasonally extreme — was, paradoxically, one of the things that kept him functional despite his grief. Traditional Chinese Medicine understands that the body in motion is better equipped to process emotion than the body at rest. The liver qi — which governs both the smooth flow of emotion and the quality of sleep — requires movement to function well. When grief is held in a body that does not move, it stagnates. When it is held in a body that moves through the world — on horseback, on foot, in the cold air of the northern steppe — it has a channel through which to flow.

For those of us whose grief or anxiety or emotional weight is less dramatic but no less real, the prescription is the same: move the body, especially in the hours before sleep. Not to exhaust the emotion away, but to give it a channel. A walk in the evening air. A few minutes of gentle stretching that opens the chest and the hips — the areas where grief tends to accumulate in the body. The body that has been given permission to move its emotion is the body that can, eventually, rest from it.

Nutrition: The Banquet That Cannot Fill the Absence

Nalan Xingde lived in extraordinary material comfort. The Qing imperial court was one of the most lavishly provisioned in Chinese history — the finest foods, the rarest teas, the most skilled cooks. And none of it touched the particular hunger that his poetry describes: the hunger for what cannot be eaten, the thirst for what cannot be drunk.

This is the nutritional wisdom that his life illustrates by negative example: food can nourish the body, but it cannot nourish the shen. The spirit that is grieving requires a different kind of nourishment — one that Traditional Chinese Medicine addresses through specific foods that support the heart system and calm the emotional turbulence that disrupts sleep.

In TCM, the heart governs both the circulation of blood and the residence of the shen. When the heart is disturbed by grief or longing, the shen becomes unsettled, producing the restless, dream-filled, easily interrupted sleep that Nalan Xingde describes in poem after poem. The foods that support the heart in this state are those that nourish without stimulating: lotus seeds, which calm the heart and anchor the spirit; lily bulb, which moistens and soothes; longan fruit, which nourishes the blood and quiets the mind; red dates, which tonify the heart qi and support emotional stability.

These are not remedies for grief. Grief cannot be remedied by food. But the body that is well-nourished at the level of the heart system is better equipped to carry grief without being overwhelmed by it — to feel the loss fully without losing the capacity for rest.

Bedtime Ritual: The Permission to Grieve

Nalan Xingde's bedtime ritual, as his poetry describes it, was a ritual of remembrance. He would lie down in the dark and allow himself to think of Lu — to remember her voice, her presence, the specific quality of the life they had briefly shared. He did not try to suppress the grief or distract himself from it. He went toward it, in the dark, with his full attention.

This is counterintuitive to modern sleep advice, which generally recommends avoiding emotionally activating thoughts before bed. But Nalan Xingde's practice points toward something that modern grief research has since confirmed: suppressed grief does not disappear. It goes underground, where it continues to disturb sleep from below the level of conscious awareness. The grief that is given permission to be present — that is acknowledged, felt, and then gently set aside — is less disruptive to sleep than the grief that is denied and therefore cannot be processed.

The bedtime ritual that his life suggests is one of honest emotional accounting — not rumination, but acknowledgment. Before sleep, spend a few minutes with whatever you are carrying. Name it. Feel it. And then, as gently as you can, set it down for the night. Not because it is resolved — grief is rarely resolved — but because the night requires a different kind of attention than the day, and the body deserves the rest that only genuine release can provide.

The physical environment of this ritual matters. Nalan Xingde wrote of silk repeatedly — the silk of the court, the silk of the bed, the silk of the garments that his wife had worn. For him, silk carried the memory of what had been. For us, it can carry something different: the intention of care, the choice to surround the body with materials that speak the language of nourishment rather than neglect.

To dress the bed in silk is not vanity. It is the declaration that the body — even the body that is grieving, even the body that cannot sleep — deserves to be held with care.

Sleep Quality: The Dream That Brings Her Back

Nalan Xingde's most heartbreaking poems are about dreams — the dreams in which Lu returns, in which the loss is temporarily undone, in which the world is briefly as it was before. And then the waking, which takes her again.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, this pattern — vivid, emotionally intense dreams that leave the dreamer more exhausted than rested — is understood as a sign of heart fire rising to disturb the shen. The heart, overwhelmed by unprocessed emotion, cannot settle the spirit into the deep, quiet rest that genuine sleep requires. The shen wanders through the night, seeking what it cannot find in waking life, and returns at dawn having found only the dream — which dissolves at the moment of waking.

The path to better sleep quality, in this framework, is not the suppression of the dream but the settling of the heart. This happens gradually, through the consistent practice of emotional acknowledgment during the day — through movement that processes rather than suppresses, through nourishment that supports rather than stimulates, through a bedtime ritual that gives the grief its moment before asking the body to rest.

Nalan Xingde never fully found this settling. He died too young, his grief too fresh, his heart too loyal to what it had lost. But his poetry — in its extraordinary precision about the texture of sleepless grief — has helped millions of readers find their own way toward it. In naming what he felt, he gave others permission to name what they feel. And naming, as we have seen in every tradition from TCM to modern psychology, is the beginning of release.

In the Age of AI: The Longing That Algorithms Cannot Resolve

We live in an age that has declared war on difficult emotion. Artificial intelligence offers mood optimization, cognitive behavioral interventions, personalized content designed to shift emotional states. The algorithm, detecting sadness, serves up content calibrated to distract or uplift. The notification arrives at the moment of stillness, filling the space where grief might otherwise be felt.

Nalan Xingde would have recognized this immediately. The Qing imperial court had its own version of distraction — the endless ceremony, the elaborate entertainment, the social performance that left no room for the private grief of a young man who had lost his wife. He escaped it by writing. By going into the dark and feeling what he felt and putting it into words.

In our time, the escape is the same, even if the medium is different. Put down the device. Turn off the content. Sit with what is actually present in the emotional body — the longing, the loss, the unnamed weight that has been carried through the day without acknowledgment. Give it a few minutes of honest attention. And then, as Nalan Xingde did in his best moments, set it gently aside and ask the body to rest.

Sleep is not the absence of emotion. It is the body's way of processing emotion at a level deeper than conscious thought. The body that has been given permission to feel — that has not been distracted from its grief or its longing or its unnamed weight — is the body that can surrender to that deeper processing. The body that has been kept perpetually distracted carries its unprocessed emotion into sleep, where it becomes the vivid, exhausting dream that Nalan Xingde knew so well.

In the age of infinite distraction, the most courageous act is to feel what you feel — and then, having felt it, to rest.

The Poet Who Loved Too Well to Sleep

Nalan Xingde lived thirty years and wrote some of the most emotionally precise poetry in the Chinese literary tradition. He had everything that privilege could provide and could not sleep for want of what privilege cannot replace. His life is a reminder that rest is not a function of material comfort — that the finest silk and the most lavish court cannot give the body what it needs if the heart has not been given permission to grieve.

Move the body through the day, giving emotion a channel rather than a cage. Nourish the heart with foods that support rather than stimulate. Before sleep, give the grief — whatever form it takes — its moment of honest acknowledgment. Create a sleeping environment that speaks the language of care: cool, quiet, and wrapped in materials that the body recognizes as nourishing. And then, as gently as you can, set down what you are carrying and ask the night to hold it for a while.

If life were only as at first meeting — but it is not, and it cannot be, and the heart that has accepted this is the heart that can finally rest.

Rest is not the forgetting of what we have loved. It is the trust that what we have loved will still be there when we wake.

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Carry Your Longing into Sacred Space

Nalan Xingde carried his longing through the imperial court, across the northern steppe, into the dark of sleepless nights — and transformed it into poetry that has outlasted the dynasty he served. We carry the longings of our members into spaces where longing has been offered to something larger than the self for centuries. Every month, we journey to ancient temples and Taoist sanctuaries across China — lighting incense, offering prayers, and carrying the intentions of our members into sacred spaces. Those who walk with us for six months or more will receive, at year's end, a curated collection of sacred tokens gathered from the altars and shrines along our path — small objects that hold the memory of incense smoke, mountain silence, and whispered prayers. Each piece travels from a place of stillness to find its way to you. Discover the Journey →🕯️🏮☯️

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