When Yang Dingyi was 7 years old, his father accepted a teaching position at a university in Brazil, and the family moved there together. In a country where soccer was woven into daily life, the young boy quickly joined the local children on the field.
Then, one day, something unusual happened.
In the middle of an intense match, a teammate passed the ball to him. Suddenly, everything around him seemed to recede. The shouts of the parents, the noise from the sidelines, even the rush of the game itself — all of it became distant, as though the world had drifted far away. His mind went completely blank. A deep stillness filled him.
And then, in that stillness, a miracle unfolded.
With the ball at his feet, Yang Dingyi began running from the backfield toward the front. He covered some 70 meters (about 230 feet), weaving through the opposing team as though no one could touch him. Four defenders tried to stop him, yet not one succeeded. At last, from about 20 meters (roughly 65 feet) from the goal, he struck the ball cleanly with his left foot. It sailed into the net with ease.
The goalkeeper could only stand there, watching helplessly as the ball passed overhead.
For a brief moment, the field fell silent. Then applause broke out like thunder. Everyone was astonished. This frail Chinese boy had, for that instant, seemed almost like a legendary soccer king reborn.
And yet Yang Dingyi himself was left puzzled. Why was it that when his mind held onto nothing at all, everything flowed so perfectly?
Later, he came to understand something from that experience: Sometimes, when a person stops clinging to success and lets the mind become still, success comes on its own.
The leap beyond limits
Around the age of eight or nine, he experienced another strange event — one that led him to another insight about life.
One day, he and his younger brother were comparing how high they could jump by reaching for the top of a doorframe. It was the sort of simple game many children play. His brother, though a year and a half younger, was taller and easily leaped high enough to touch the frame and leave a mark.
Yang Dingyi looked up at the doorframe and hesitated. As the older brother, he did not want to come up short. But the frame seemed impossibly high.
Still, he resolved to try.
Grinding his teeth and pushing off with all his strength, he jumped.
And then something happened that he could not explain.
He kept rising.
It felt as though he were floating upward, free from the pull of gravity. He not only passed the doorframe, but reached all the way to the ceiling. Later, he estimated that his feet had left the ground by at least 1.2 to 1.3 meters — around 4 feet.
To understand how extraordinary that would be, consider this: Most people can only jump about 50 centimeters (roughly 20 inches). For professional NBA players, a vertical leap of 80 centimeters is already solid, while anything above 90 centimeters is considered exceptional. Yao Ming’s vertical leap was said to be around 55 centimeters, and even Michael Jordan — famous for his extraordinary athleticism — reached about 1.22 meters.
And here was a nine-year-old boy who seemed to have risen just as high.
His younger brother was stunned. Half-jokingly, he asked whether Yang Dingyi had hidden a spring inside his shoes.
But Yang Dingyi himself had no answer. In that moment of ascent, he had felt something vividly real — a sensation of weightlessness, as if some invisible force within him had lifted him beyond ordinary physical limits. It was a feeling of complete freedom, without restraint.
From that experience came another realization: Perhaps every human being carries extraordinary abilities, far greater than we imagine. Yet we become bound by layers of belief, doubt, and conditioning until we no longer trust what may already be within us.
The forgotten gifts of childhood
Many years later, Yang Dingyi shared these unusual childhood memories in a memoir titled Miracles.
In it, he suggested that many children encounter experiences that seem supernatural while growing up. Some fall from great heights without injury. Some suddenly seem able to understand what animals are saying. Some glimpse beings or worlds beyond ordinary sight. Others begin speaking words from languages they have never learned.
Most people dismiss such things as accidents or fantasies. But Yang Dingyi proposed another possibility.
Perhaps these moments are not random at all.
Perhaps they are signs of something innate — abilities that belong to us more naturally than we realize, yet are gradually buried beneath disbelief.
In his view, the extraordinary is not always something given from outside. Sometimes it is something already present, something forgotten as a child grows older and learns to doubt what once came naturally.
And so, what many call coincidence may in fact be the faint echo of a deeper human potential — one that remains hidden only because we no longer believe in it.
See Part I here
Translated by Katy Liu
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