MEDITATIONS: TAO TE CHING CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

the ancient child asks
how do you get out of the bodymind’s way and let it live

by allowing your soul to take lead of your life

the ancient child asks
how do you let the soul take lead of your life

be as gentle and tender as a newborn
soft, yielding, supple, and full of life force

avoid stiffness, rigidity, and naked force

emulate the living things of the world delicately
and at a distance

avoid hardening your bodymind and spirit
avoid those unyielding things that stink and decay

embody those things that are tender and pliant
which grant life and freedom

avoid mustering your talents and collecting you strengths
in a forceful or headstrong manner

remember
an unyielding tree will snap under a strong wind
or fall easily under a dull axe

pattern yourself after a great tree
with deep roots and strong branches
and you will exalt your bodymind and spirit

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

Throughout much of the Tao Te Ching, we are implored to cultivate flexibility and softness. We are instructed toward yielding rather than towards opposition. Framed in the dichotomy of acceptance-of versus rejection-of the conditions of life, this instruction only makes sense. To yield or submit to factors outside one’s control allows one to tend to those which he can actually do something about.

However, it seems to me that most of us do not think in these terms or within this frame (even if we all exist within it). Many view life through some iteration of a “perfect freedom of the will,” that is, they see life as a thing to be conquered. They see all limitations as possible to be broken, and they believe that the universe can and ought to be brought into line with an the individual’s or collective’s will. To those of us whom this describes, I request you consider the following:

What if softness, suppleness, flexibility, submission, and the willingness to yield were metaphorical conceptions for voluntary adaptation? That is to say, by “yielding” what is meant is that he who “yields” changes his attitudes behaviors, tactics, and strategies to fit the situation he finds himself in. If a challenge or environment is taken as given (which, for any action to be taken, must in the end become the case), what then? Is it not proper to act in accordance with that which is preferable or successful? Use whatever reasonable definition of success or achievement you like, but whatever you choose, do answer the question. In the end, when a choice is made (or not made), is it not necessarily the case that the approach, attitude, or action which conforms to what actually is is what will achieve one’s goals?

Undeniably, yes.

When it comes down to it, that which works is that which affirms life as it really is. This requires discernment on our part, and by no means are we equipped to ever know life perfectly. Nevertheless, we live in the world and are thereby called to action. Thereby are we handed our ultimatum. We can open ourselves to our most adaptive instincts and intuitions—those that have been inherited, shaped to fit the world through selective evolutionary pressures—or we can close ourselves off to those very feelings by refusing to remold our attitudes, preferring instead the life-denying fool’s errand of forcing the world to conform to the will, to our preferences and our passions.

Choosing the latter is choosing the illusory security of certainty at the cost of ignorance of the unknown. It is stultification of thought, the crystallization of learning. It is the dying of a great tree whose roots will cease to delve, whose roots can only become shorter and more exposed as time marches forward. Eventually, the ever changing weather and ever shifting soil will topple such a tree, no matter how large—perhaps, even, the largest trees fall first and hardest.

Deep, living roots require voluntary explore the unknown. They require a willingness to be wrong, to acknowledge that they’ve run into a stone and ought to divert their path from where they thought they wanted to go to where they now realize they’d be better off. And these deeper roots allows for higher, broader branches to grow.

Lao-tzu. “Chapter Seventy-Six”. Tao Te Ching; An Authentic Taoist Translation, translated by John Bright-Fey, Sweetwater Press, 2014. p.138