The Classic of The Way and Its Power

It’s started to feel to me like our physical life is something closer to the Navy’s Indoor Ocean at Carderock than it is the actual one. Life lessons have always seemed to come in waves, but I have to admit that the timing of them and the angles at which they converge on my tiny hull feels intentional more often than it does random and I’ve struggled to find another explanation. And in fact, explanation might be the singular struggle of my internal life for its entire duration. I have always tried to treat life experience as textual exegesis, hoping to parse the meaning from mistakes or breakthroughs in an attempt to learn enough lessons and improve enough so that I deserve to exist or live in some form of abundance and stability. Fun times amiright. So after a dog walk this morning that I spent the majority of metaphysically Googling whether life is a didactic wave pool or not, I got home exhausted and decided to hit up the homie Lao Tzu for some biscuits-and-gravy level existential belly warmth.

I only recently got a copy of the Tao Te Ching (translated roughly from Chinese as The Classic of The Way and Its Power) but it has already begun to work wonders on my particular penchant for rushing to read the tea leaves rather than just experiencing the fucking tea. And the first thing I turned to this morning was this:

Maybe trying to explain my life or its grander context isn’t the same as governing a large country, but it feels like it lends itself to similar amounts of potential administrative stress and implication that has never led to healthy places for me. And it was incredibly calming to think not only about my current difficulties but my broader context of however I would describe reality if someone held a gun to my head as small fish I’m frying. Too much poking has, no doubt, always spoiled them, and regardless of my opinion on them they have both certainly come from someone else’s ocean.