“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
– Bruce Lee
We are in a time of the year that we associate with change, the season of Autumn, when we see leaves turn vibrant colours before falling. The Autumn equinox was on 22nd of September, where the length of the day matched the length of the night and it signals the change from Summer to Autumn. It is the mid-point between the Summer and Winter Solstices. Although change is a constant, it is not so clearly expressed in nature as it is in Autumn.
In day to day life change can be seen when cups of tea or coffee go cold, when children become adults and then become old and the future all to quickly becoming the past. It is a fact of life that things will always change, yet often our experience in life is that some things seem to stay the same. This is usually because the change of these things is slow. Yet over a long enough time-line key features of a generation often seem very familiar. The fashion of today seems a little reminiscent of fashions of the past, which I suppose is to be expected, after-all fashion is an aspect of culture, which defines itself by what has come before, either by being different from it, or being the same as it, and it appears to me that the same fashions come around again every twenty to thirty years, in an ever changing cycle, which goes back again and again to where it came from, though is never exactly the same as it was the previous time, or the time before that. This idea is put well in the book Hagakure, The Book of the Samurai. It says this:
“It is said that what is called “the spirit of an age” is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world’s coming to an end. In the same way, a single year does not have just spring or summer. A single day too, is the same.
For this reason, although one would like to change today’s world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done.”
We often wish that things could be as they were when we were younger, or we wish we could go back to a time in our lives when things were better, but, we always look back at our pasts with rose tinted glasses, and if we did go back, I suspect that it would not be as good as we think it would be, and this would ruin the memory we have of that time. Our perspective of the memories that we have changes too, as we experience new things and gain new understanding of the world around us. This all gives us new understanding of our memories as well, which in turn changes the memories we have. There will certainly be memories from the past 18 months that we would prefer to forget, if we could.
From the perspective of many religions from the East, the present is all that exists, and the past only exists in our present mind, there is only the now, which is itself eternal, because it is always here, yet that which exists always changes in a constantly evolving moment. However, that is not to say that memories are not to be treasured, of cause they are. We all have photo albums documenting our lives and the lives of those we care about. Some of the first baby photos of me that my parents showed to my Wife were those in which I was not wearing any clothes, or I had covered myself in food. Photos are put into albums, not only to be treasured by ourselves, but also so that we can easily show them to other people, and in doing so, share the experiences we had. After-all, life is to be shared, is it not? These moments that our photo albums document are themselves, often, moments of change, the first day of school, all dressed up in our school uniforms, our birthdays, weddings, christenings and so on, these are all times in which we were once one thing and we became another. All very personal moments in our life stories.
On a larger scale, all the changes that occur in the culture around us are a kind of background noise, in comparison to these personal changes that each of us make, or have thrust upon us, each day. For me personally, getting married was not that much of a change, because my Wife and I carried on happily as we did before we were Mr and Mrs, though the wedding day itself was joyous. Becoming a father was much more of a change for me, and demanded a few inner changes to how I saw the world, as well as some changes to how I lived my life, which is continuing to evolve. This is all a natural part of being a parent, as well as wanting our children to be happy and healthy, no matter what changes life might throw at them.
It can be difficult to walk the fine line between fearing change and embracing it, especially after how devastating the COVID-19 pandemic has been in some people’s lives, through losing loved one, losing regular income with the loss of a job or being separated from those we love. We truly do not know what is around the corner in life, but we do need to find balance in all the potential and real chaos. In Taoism, they have the symbol of the Yin and Yang, which is very familiar to most people. It is a circle with one black part and one white part, each of which has a spot of the opposing colour within them. The general principle behind this symbol is that in every good there is bad and in every bad there is good, if you look for it, and that life is constantly an interplay moving back and forth from good to bad and back again. If we understand that this is how life operates, then finding balance to navigate the events of life can be very beneficial. If we put all of our energy into one thing in our lives, even if it is good, other areas in our lives suffer and eventually the thing we are investing our time in stops being so good for us too.
Equally, if we worry about the bad things that are, or might, happen, then our life also gets out of balance. It is like navigating a boat through the waters of our lives, with one leg on the port side and one on the starboard side. If we tip too much one way or another, then we fall in. Finding balance means checking in with ourselves every day to see if we are looking after every part of our lives. Cultivating our relationships, working hard at work, taking care of our family, managing our finances, focusing on our spirituality, etc.
There is another concept you may have heard before, the concept of flow. The state you are in when everything you are doing is effortless and time disappears, because you are fully engaged and really enjoying what you are doing. In Taoist thinking this is referred to as Wu Wei, the art of non-action. To our Western ears this sounds paradoxical, but it has finally sunk in in my head recently and I finally get it. Wu Wei is flow, it is effortless action, it is doing, not worrying or planning or speculating, it is the act of just doing. Put another way, the art of non-action is to embrace flow instead of effort to achieve a result. Living life through Wu Wei is, as Bruce Lee said in the quotation at the top of this blog post, being like water. He said, “Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it.” And with many Eastern things, this is an art more than a science. My advice would be to try to do everything that you are doing with joy, and then this flow state will be more accessible. As Sadhguru, a Guru from India, has said “Anything you do joyfully is always effortless.”
When big changes appear in our lives, the more flexible we are in our thinking, the easier it will be to manage the challenges each big change brings. Some changes are thrust upon us, as we have experienced, they are things that are out of our control, and we have to some how deal with them in the best way that we can, by focusing on what is in our control, which includes choosing to be in a joyful state. These times of major change are times that will test our characters, they will highlight the strengths we have, and tell us how strong we are inside. The paradox of Wu Wei is that being humble and flexible is stronger than being full of ego and rigid when we want a positive outcome.
For those of us that are not strong in difficult times, such as a tragedy or a pandemic, there are others, to whom we turn, that are strong and who support us through these hard times. We all have people like this in our lives, perhaps you are the person to whom those around you turn when they need a strong pillar to support them. If you are such a person I commend you, because without people like you many of us would not be able to cope. However, you also need to have people around you to whom you can turn in difficult times.
At the end of reading this blog post you will get on with the things you have planned for today, the rest of the week, and the rest of the year. The seasons will change from Autumn to Winter to Spring to Summer and back to Autumn again, the sun will rise and set as it has for millions of years and change will continue to affect our lives. How we choose to respond to the changes we each face is up to us, but I hope that most of the changes in your lives are for the better and the changes that are hard to bear are lessened by those around you, those who care about you, and those you care about. These are the consistencies that allow us to deal with the changes that life throws at us.
I would like to end with another quotation about Autumn, by Albert Camus. “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
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