MEDITATIONS: TAO TE CHING CHAPTER EIGHTY

keep your life simple and interesting

striving for great talent and skill
striving for great and perfect tools
is not the true way

have just enough talent
have just enough skill
have just the right amount of tools for work
have just the right amount of weapons for protection

the ancient child asks
how much is the right amount

know one hundred songs
so you can play a single simple melody
from the heart
to a heart

treat complex things
as simple things
arranged in a pattern
that
once you are at peace
can be easily deciphered

remember your ancient roots
read your history
relish your food
revel in your habits and customs
rest in your home
return to the tried and true

place great value in the natural order
of life and death

do not wander far from home

play and have fun in your life
and your back yard
will become a world
that will take a lifetime to explore

what could be better

—Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching; An authentic Taoist translation. translated by John Bright-Fey

I have in the past asked many people what they wanted to do with their lives. Very often, I received some variation of the answer, “I want to travel and experience the world.” Never have I ever been satisfied with this response. It smacks of vacuousness, hedonism, and will-to-distraction. It is so often the materialist wish for indulgence sensory experience wearing the guise of spiritual depth and significance.

But if you cannot find meaning in your life as it is, why should you believe you will find meaning or profundity in something someplace outside yourself?

Before adventuring out into the world, perhaps you should first try to venture within yourself. Perhaps you will find more within than without—perhaps more than you want to find—and maybe that is why you’d rather look somewhere else. The same can be said for boundless ambition. You will never find purpose, contentment, or satisfaction if your aim is always beyond yourself.

So instead of turning your focus outward and upward, turn it down and in. Discover who you are and what potentials reside within you, waiting to be made manifest. Realize that you are an amalgamation of different things: a pantheon of biological drives, an inherited history and culture, adopted practices, habits, as well as that consciousness you mistake for the entirety of yourself. Look at yourself like you’re watching a stranger and learn your limits, who you’re not, and what you could and cannot become. Find and restore the tools left to you by your ancestors, those heritable proclivities, abilities, and generations of tradition. Dig them up from the forgotten dark, buff off the rust, and polish them until they shine in the modern day in which you live your life.

Only then, once you’ve delved and discovered the bottomless well within yourself will you have room to be filled by profound experience of the world.

Lao-tzu. “Chapter Eighty”. Tao Te Ching; An Authentic Taoist Translation, translated by John Bright-Fey, Sweetwater Press, 2014. pp.142-43